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Dark and cheerless is the morn
November! The most joyless and dismal of all months. Gone are the glorious days of autumn, with their russet shaded trees and red tinged sunsets. Far off are the golden days of summer; warm sunshine and visitors aplenty. (Not that the season left much leisure time for me, with the ceaseless weddings occupying successive Saturdays in a seemingly never ending procession.)
Standing at the edge of this bleak month it is easy to be depressed. Ahead lie the dark nights and late dawns. Cold weather deters the elderly from venturing out and congregation numbers, already depleted, threaten to sink to an all time low. All that there is to look forward to is an astronomical gas bill for taking the chill off empty churches.
Is that all? The Advent candles arrived while there were still tomatoes ripening in the greenhouse. The Christingle envelopes and the Christmas posters were ordered long before the clocks went back. November is not an end to all that is good, it is the transitional month between the happy days before and the better days after. It was fortuitous that Pope Gregory III chose November 1st for the celebration of All Saints. At this point in the year we needed something to cheer us up. What better than a reminder of those optimistic spirits who were always looking forward and never back?
This is the month of preparation. It is always exciting planning for what lies ahead. A time to start writing invitations to the Christingle services to those many children we have baptized over the years, a period for poring over seed catalogues, gearing ourselves up for the annual bazaar, finding the cheap Christmas cards that we bought in the January sales and put somewhere safe, watching the repeats of all those television programmes that we missed in the summer, or was it last autumn? The future, though not orange, is bright. Already eager young couples are queuing up to book their weddings for next year, baptisms, in the doldrums for a while, are coming in, and at the end of this month we shall welcome a new Archbishop. I wonder if the last one incinerated my personal files. If he did, things could look good.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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