Monday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Yesterday daylight savings time came to a close. The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer. The days are getting cooler and the nights are even colder. Glorious hued foliage, dancing in the crisp autumn air, are soon but memories. The world “falls” into slumber, awaiting spring.
The genius of the liturgical year is how it is bound so closely to the natural world. The scripture proclaimed today turns us towards the “last things.” The earth is doing the same. This is already evident if we have eyes to see (nature) and ears to hear (scripture).
The inscrutable and unsearchable mind of God shines in the Word and in the world. Today Paul’s masterpiece Letter to the Romans reminds: Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable and unsearchable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? For from him and through him and for him are all things (Romans 11:33-36).
World and Word offer a peek into the “mind of God.” Everything has had or will have finality. We fail to see what is right in front of our eyes because denial blinds us. Disconnect descends, the end times of which nature and scripture speak are put aside.
“How is it possible to refuse to admit to death in a world where everybody dies?” - Irish writer Kevin Toolis.
Prematurely, to complicate matters, comes the annual compulsion to deck the halls and make merry & bright. We unconsciously deny what both the earth and late Ordinary Time reveal. We choose retail over retreat, holiday rush over autumn hush.
Chrismahanukwanzakah? It has many names, arriving now in some circles even before the miniature goblins and ghouls haunted our front porches. Yuletide chops-at-the-bit, falsely claiming that we can have joy without sacrifice or affliction. Attempting to devour more and more of the calendar each year, the “holidays” stand ready to pounce. With enough glitz and glitter we can block out what both liturgy and the land unfolds before us. “All is calm, all is bright” all the time.
Paul asks, “who can know the mind of God?” These weeks of November offer a peek. Death is a beautiful thing and autumn an interplay between life and death, a sign that a new beginning is on the horizon.
Will we see the truth in our autumnal world and hear what the fall scriptures have to say? Do they not give us at least a glance at the unsearchable and inscrutable mind of God?
-Timothy J. Cronin