A Line, Not a Circle

          As autumn deepens and days grow shorter, as another year ambles towards its end, the annual cycle of the seasons sometimes gets compared to a man’s life.  True, like the year, man has a spring, summer, fall, and winter. The great American artist, Thomas Cole, masterfully captured that in his four paintings that make up “The Voyage of Life.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life ]

          But, as Milcho Manchevski reminds us, “the circle [of time] is not round.”  The seasons may be like man’s voyage of life, with one crucial difference: he only gets one cruise.

          John Greenleaf Whittier reminds us of this.  Once a popular American poet he’s gone into eclipse, like many of the great 19th century American poets pre-Walt Whitman.  A Quaker, Whittier was popular for the moral dimension to his writing.

          In “Autumn Thoughts” [https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=927 – an appropriate reading at this time of year – Whittier recounts a conversation between himself and the Earth, in which the latter reminds him that, in the fall standing on the brink of winter, it might have a “wintry sleep with dreams,” hibernating to await a new spring, new flowers, new summer.

          But man’s coming sleep is not like that.  “No hope is thine of sunnier hours//Thy Winter shall no more depart;//No Spring revive thy wasted flowers,//
Nor Summer warm thy frozen heart.”

          The Church often associates sleep and death.  Both themes overlap each other, for example in daily Night Prayer, where we ask the Lord for “a restful night and a peaceful death.”  But they are distinct, and man’s journey of life heads not towards some reincarnated replay but a higher journey, a line to (or from) the heart of God shot by man in the course of his life. 

          Sunday is All Soul’s Day and November a month when the Church reminds us to pray for the dead and consider our own mortality.  “One life you have and only one” from which, as Whittier reminds, “winter shall no more depart.”   As you watch the leaves fall, remember the counsel of Fr. Josemaria Escriva: "Have you seen the dead leaves fall in the sad autumn twilight? Thus souls fall each day into eternity. One day, the falling leaf will be you" (The Way, nr 736).  
 

            In these days of autumn, let us reckon well with the truth: man’s life is a line, not a circle.