The Soul-Sundering Beauty of Surrender
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August 30, 2020Today’s gospel speaks of self-denial and the cross, of the undeniable necessity of dying, and of life lost and found. As we approach the end of summer and start to see signs of the season of autumn – a breath of cool air, a red leaf here and there – I can’t help finding a connection between the death spoken of in the gospel, the little deaths we experience throughout life, and the one that is played out before us each year in nature. A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins touches this topic with some depth of insight, and so I would like to share it with you by way of commentary on the gospel.
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
The poet is speaking to a little girl, whose sensitive heart is pierced with sorrow at the sight of the poor tree whose leaves have all fallen off. What if Margaret took it into her head to make the tree all better by putting its leaves back on? You can just picture it: the sight of a determined little person gathering, twisting, pushing, tying, perhaps begging some glue or magic tape to aid her endeavor. Sooner or later, she will learn that her will to save the tree hits its limit in the scale of the loss. There are too many leaves and they just won’t stay on! She cannot do it; she cannot make it all better. This is Peter’s lesson too. In his attempt to save Jesus from the cross, he fails to understand (and how could he?) that the path of life has to pass through the valley of death. How could he? – because it is Jesus himself who blazes the trail through death to life.
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
As Margaret grows up, she will begin to see that not only do trees lose their leaves, people lose things that seemed precious and inalienably part of them. People lose their hair, their figure, their health and strength, sometimes their job or their house, a parent, child or spouse, the hopes and dreams of their youth, their illusions, their ideals, perhaps their dignity, their independence and even their freedom. What are these “worlds of wanwood leafmeal”? All things are subject to the law of entropy, which is what physicists call decay on a universal scale. In time the magnitude of losses human beings have to suffer can max out our capacity to feel. We can become cold, cynical, pragmatic.
And yet, the season of falling leaves may reawaken a childlike heart to the poignancy of our existence. As adults, we no longer weep for the “poor little tree,” but we do weep for our own losses, and for all that lies waste and derelict at the feet of human endeavor. Even to have freely renounced possibilities such as marriage and family, career and breadth of experience, as we do when we make our vows, does not mean we will not shed tears for these things later. When the loss makes itself felt, the reason for letting go reasserts itself. Our heart is pierced by pain and beauty alike. We weep, and now we know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
“Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same” – the tears I shed for losses small or great are not fundamentally different that those shed by the child in me for a tree bereft of its leaves. The child does not know and cannot speak words that touch the deeper sorrow, but her heart hears it, her spirit senses it. “It is Margaret you mourn for” – myself, and in me all creation subject to destruction. Dare I claim one more level? – sorrow’s deepest spring, the tears of God’s own heart, the price of love poured out.
Spring and Fall is the title and the context in which this poem dwells. Spring stands for youth, freshness and life; fall stands for age, coldness and death. Leaves must be lost as part of the cycle of life and death: death always creating conditions for reemergence of life, new life always in the process of dying. We resonate with rhythms of nature because our experience is likewise cyclical, and yet it is ordered to an end which transcends our mortality. The Fall which is the source of death gives way to Christ’s redemptive resurrection, the Spring of life irrepressible. In the drama of salvation, God takes the natural cycle and recreates it as a path to irrevocable newness of life. For the Christian, everything, no matter how poignant, occurs within the embracing context of resurrected life. This fall season, especially in its New England form, begs the question: do we see in autumnal losses only a sad accumulation of life’s detritus, or do we see a carpet of glory, a lesson in the soul-sundering beauty of sacrifice and surrender?
“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 16:25)
Our losses, our trials are sometimes spectacular in form, like the red, orange and gold of October woods. We may be gifted to see the meaning of what we are going through, even as we stagger beneath its weight. We are like martyrs with an audience of supporters waving flags to cheer us on. And this is just fine, because God knows our weakness and provides for it. A purer sacrifice may be called for when God prepares us to step into the darkness of faith. These are the losses and trials that seems to have no meaning; they are neither heroic nor even visible and so lack the supportive appreciation of others. Dom Gerard of Genesee spoke of this at the retreat he gave us a few years back. He said that some of our sufferings seem to us to be unworthy of the cross of Christ because they are self-inflicted, the result of stupidity, laziness, or mediocrity. But they still count! Even trials that humiliate us, and perhaps especially they, can be a share in the cross – why? – because Christ “is not ashamed to call them ‘brothers’” (Hb 2:11). In the place of our weakness, our foolishness, Christ makes himself at home. So our leaves fall, but they do so gorgeously. If our heart hears it, if our spirit senses it, however obscurely, we lay claim to an inner peace that is indestructible.
Let us then enter the season of falling leaves with a childlike heart, open to the poignancy of human existence, to the pain and beauty of the way through death to life on which Christ has gone before us, on which Christ walks with us.
