I’d like to share with you something I’ve been pondering as the season changes.
There’s something urgently authentic about the fall. It isn’t just the frenetic squirrels or the birds vaunting over each other in the turning trees. And it’s not just the necessary hum of human preparations for an imminent holiday rotation. These certainly play into our experience, but the year’s turn, the planetary rotation and the chill drop in light that trigger creaturely responses, all of this seems to invite a contemplation particular to the time.
Underneath all the activity, there’s a sense of having accepted the signs of approaching winter and, consequently, rejected the possibility of hesitation. There’s no time for anything less than the utmost of color and light and movement. There’s no time for anything less than Beauty before we die.
Strange as it sounds, I’m realizing that a similar kind of impatience lives under the measured rhythms I witness in the monks’ morning prayer. It doesn’t negate – or even detract from – the slow, deliberate order. If anything, it bolsters the stable continuity of these forms, strengthening them in the same way that eagerness for someone’s arrival gives an added energy and firmness of purpose to the concrete necessities of preparation.
St. Augustine famously wrote that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God],” and it is this same yearning that I see reflected in the monks’ decision to rise every morning and attend to their faithful, vigil quiet. It’s the restlessness of human hearts hungry for perfect union with God, in comparison with which nothing truly satisfies. Why occupy ourselves with anything less than Him? Our very mortality urges us to ask the question.
It isn’t that we don’t find joy in this created life. We do and should. We are both body and soul, and this very fact makes us sacramental creatures, who encounter God’s presence and grace through sensory reality. This in itself is a miraculous source of wonder. But the extraordinary outburst of joyful, autumnal color reminds us, too, of the impatience in our own hearts, the shortness of our lives, and the need for each of us to “order our days in [His] presence:” with all the radiance of anticipation that overflows in us a restless foretaste of eternal rest.
