Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom . . .
Obviously, given the heat of this first week of September, summer is still with us. But only a few days ago as I stepped out of my car to take my usual 6:30 a.m. walk around the Plaza there was a definite chill in the air. And there has been a morning nip ever since – and a darker, not sun-lit horizon every day – which leaves me with mixed moods: glad that the heat of summer may be giving way as we approach September 14/15 (the autumn equinox) yet slow to welcome the cold, dark season to come.
The Church, of course rarely deals with a change of seasons in merely meteorological terms – like the weather forecaster. The Church reads the change of seasons imaginatively, in a spiritual way. And so when this weekend the long days of summer wane to give way to the darker days of oncoming autumn and winter, the Church confronts us with the festal celebration of the Holy Cross. In other words it raises the Cross before us as a reminder that even as the days grow darker, chillier, we too must eventually face the darker seasons of our lives: the passing of youth, the aging process, the breakdown of the body, disappointment over now irretrievable mistakes, the approach of mortality, the emptiness of so much we once thought entertaining.
In other words we have to go through the impatience of the Israelites in the first reading of the festival’s liturgy – from Numbers 21: 4 ff. – when, after their springtime escape from slavery in Egypt, they find themselves stumbling across a desert, as the text says: With their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water?” So, too, after experiencing the joy of Easter, the springtime of our faith, we soon wear down, succumb to dark moods, doubt whether we will ever arrive at some promised land.
But in raising the Cross before us as we cross over into chillier, darker times and moods, the Church doesn’t do so fatalistically as might many a modern philosopher for whom death is the only future he can imagine. For us who know of Christ’s resurrection the Cross has become a key that unlocks the future, triggers a recurrent faith in so many resurrections to come, renewable springs, summers, daily sunrises without cease – yes and even an ability, our poetic ability, to dwell in these colder seasons of the year upon the glories of sweet gum, ginkgo and maple trees, the wonder of Van Gogh’s night time galaxies, of time and space without bounds, rain! Why not then during the coming seasons make our prayer that of John Henry Newman, written at a crucial, uncertain period in this life:
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, / Lead thou me on! / The night is dark, and I am far from home – lead thou me on! / Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene, – one step enough for me. . .
So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on. / O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone, / And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I / Have loved long since, and lost awhile!