Ultimate Harvest
ULTIMATE HARVEST SWIFT and bleak disappointment in the social order -of which the world is now so full-does not in any way correspond with the seasonal in nature. This is no winter after spring,...
...In the end, our prayer for the dead is really a step toward the understanding of enduring life...
...It is only within the Church that this vision of human rout can be reconciled with hope...
...An idea, an action, a prayer live because they are nursed in solitude...
...Let not the tent dwellers in the earliest meadow be forgotten...
...And yet, how much in that cosmic instant has been irretrievably forgotten...
...His prayer is often humble, of course...
...We can only guess, by the light of a few spare fragments of their handiwork bequeathed to us, what manner of men were the fathers of the race...
...The agnostic tries to steel his heart against the universal cold by clinging to something that has endured, or will (he thinks) endure...
...So much of the business of the mind and soul is purely personal...
...The everlasting defeat of all our little ventures, which leave not so much as an image upon those light waves in which the permanent stars write all history, must appal anyone who has cared that betterment should come to the world...
...For shall not another city be reared to give us residence ? Has it not been the initial prophecy of Christianity that death can be taken captive ? Curiously enough, these are the ultimate questions we cannot face alone...
...So much of glory, beauty and power he could mourn but never resurrect...
...It is, indeed, this season of the Holy Souls which alone can prepare fittingly for the mood of Advent-the mood of preparation for a future infinitely more important than the past...
...It is the mood of communion and of unity...
...When compared with the ageless reeling of the spheres the life of humanity has been, as Emerson declares, only the tick of a kitchen clock...
...It caresses lovingly the memory of one whose endearments, in the flesh, were symbols of a more profound companionship...
...Indeed, all the spiritual or political successes of mankind are not so much the products of long growth as the aftermaths of fierce and momentary flashes, either of energy or genius, which illumine the long twilights of helpless mediocrity...
...And no part of this speech is so magnificent as that which utters the silent oratory of the dead...
...And so we are led to realize gradually, through a series of petitions and meditations, how great a share in the Catholic outlook is reserved for hope...
...Gather in all who have suffered and are transfigured...
...It is as if a summons had gone to every part of the spiritual realm urging saints and angels and the militant upon earth to acclaim those who, in some manner beyond fathoming, had finished a supreme adventure...
...And joy shall be, in the end, the meaning of the dark and tragic mystery of pain...
...Yes, bring even such as, despondent, fling themselves from high towers, or lose their footing on a slippery pavement...
...Sombre music is bred of the thought that so many Escorials have become tombs, that loveliness incomparable has long since been without even a wreath of immortelles...
...And so, quite wisely, he sought to find courage for his fellow-men of Rome in the thought that imperial design would map out a greater and more enduring regime...
...There petition for the dead is transmuted into an apotheosis of the living...
...But our future is thinkable only when seen in consonance with our human past...
...Nowhere is the Church so grandiose and illustrious as in her liturgical speech...
...Virgil looked back upon Troy and his eyes filled with tears...
...And yet, as we have seen, it also implies consciousness of that past...
...This is no winter after spring, but rather something like a drought or a storm perennially hovering near and not to be warded off, because the laws which govern its appearance are beyond understanding...
...The Christian finds courage by taking into his arms all that has been forgotten...
...Is it not a similar hope that stirs in this month which Christendom has set aside for the remembrance of the dead...
...It asks peace for the spirit of a friend...
...Even those primeval holocausts and famines of which ancient poets speak are not known to many of us as passing ghastly sacrificial pageants...
...But sooner or later that petition is swallowed up into the universal outcry of the Church: Let the Lord God gather all men into His kingdom...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 3
