November brings a vision of hope!
All Saints Day — All Souls Day — to the average person, the spelling out of the fact that we are all mortals — Memento mori — Remember, Christian, you will die.
Yet, November is the month also of joy and of inner triumph and of singing alleluias. At least, it should be for every Christian. For it brings to him the perfection and the beauty of the Church in expectation of the parousia.
We call it the “Church Militant,” the “Church Suffering,” and the “Church Triumphant,” but it is all one Church — glorious and beautiful — the Bride of Christ.
Yes, November brings us a vision of splendor, a vision of hope! And it brings us thoughts of death. What does it matter how we are going to die? All that matters is that we are going to die — alleluia! For this were we born — to pass through this door of death into life everlasting.
We seek happiness. We seek love. And we forget that love beyond our understanding, happiness, beyond our comprehension, lies on the other side of death’s door.
For what is this life everlasting, this eternal life, this heaven, this paradise that all the religious books, starting from a children’s catechism, talk about? It is no less than union with God! The God who created us and the God who loves us.
He is not, as so many imagine, an old man with a beard and a stick in his hand who demands that we obey his commandments or else. No, he is the God of our fathers — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
He is our Father. He is the First Person of the Most Holy Trinity. He is Yahweh, the one who spoke through his prophets.
Listen. Is this the voice of a cold judge or of a stern father? Addressing himself to Israel, his chosen people, under the symbolism of husband and wife, he says, Even if you have lain under every bush with a stranger and prostituted yourself, I shall take you back and make you whiter than snow (Jer 2:20; 3:1-2; 3:22; Is 1:18).
Israel had been unfaithful to God by worshipping strange idols. Yet the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, Our Lord Jesus Christ came to redeem her.
Just think, for a moment, how much he loved us! He loved us enough to become a child in the womb of a woman, his creature. Listen to a child crying in the night, in the little village of Bethlehem. This is the first declaration of the love of God for man under the new dispensation. The cry of a Child, understood by anybody who has ears and a heart to listen.
Follow this Child in his hidden life at Nazareth, in his public life, when, finally, man clearly hears the voice of God. See and touch him. Then, step by step, go through the Passion into the tomb and then to his resurrection. Know the irrevocable truth of his divinity!
He rose from the dead. Because of that, we also will arise, and we shall be one with him who loved us so passionately.
November — the month of death, of joy, the month of hope.
Artwork by ©Susanne Stubbs, Madonna House.
