November Month of the Holy Souls

There is a great silence over all the land. The furrows hold in stillness the new seed—brown, bare, and earth-smelling, they keep the secret of the life that has been buried in them. There is darkness too. At night the galaxy has faded from the sky—here and there rarely some greater lamp shines through the mists that veil the zenith, but more often even the moon herself is hidden, fog-wrapped, a mere dim spilling of light into the clouds. By day too the mists hang thick. The earth lies motionless and silent under a veil. Trees and hedges near at hand are hidden away or only loom occasionally through the mists as monstrous, unnatural shapes. There is something terrifying about the familiar barns and haystacks that the mist has blotted into ghostliness. The dimness and the silence bring a sense of fear, as of a land changed. Yet it is only the exhalations of the earth that have given this sinister, mysterious cast to loved, familiar objects. A gleam of sunlight falls upon the mists, and for a moment they part and show us the waiting furrow, and the hedgerows pearled with moisture and bloomed with a soft, spring-like purple that reminds us of March’s brave passional livery of redemption. Though despoiled, and bound, the earth is not dead, and in her already a new harvest sleeps.

“For thou, O Lord, changest, but takest not away the life of thy people....” They are changed, they have gone from us, the mists of earth hide them from us and give to their loved, familiar personalities a touch of the sinister, of ghostliness. If we would let her, the earth would make them ghosts. But as our prayers strive through the mists that veil not them but us, a gleam of sunlight falls, and for a moment we catch a glimpse of them in their passional livery of redemption, waiting there under the altar, the prisoners of hope. “Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.”

They are changed. They no longer look into the same mirror as ourselves, the mirror of nature where supernature lies reflected as in a glass darkly. They do not yet see face to face, but theirs is no longer the mirror of the months, where together with divine things strange troubling things of earth are shown, where often Narcissus sees but his own image calling him down into the well of shadows. Their mirror, though a reflector only, is unclouded and cannot deceive. They have escaped out of the deceiver’s power, and can no longer be touched by the evil that preys on the world. They have left that evil behind in space and time, by virtue of him who for their sake assumed space and time that he might bind with them the enemy of eternity.

They are changed. They have entered as it were into a new function as mediators, for they are now a link between us and those unknown worlds whose complexity makes the unity of creation. We cannot limit our conception of life to beings like ourselves. If they live, and we know that they live, they do not live as we do, but manifest themselves in other ways and under other conditions. Spirit and manifestation—the first is always the same, the latter is constantly changing. But spirit shall never be without manifestation—that truth was proclaimed for all time in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, and is preserved for all time in the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. We shall not live as the helpless and futile shades of a Greek paradise, but as body and spirit, though that idea of a body need not bind us to the body as we know it now. The body of the springing corn in May is very different from the body of the seed that was cast into the November furrow, but it is as much the corn as ever was the seed—indeed it is more, for in the seed the idea of the corn slept undeveloped, uncertain and incomplete. Nevertheless the body of the springing corn was formed invisibly in the seed, and invisibly in the bodies of our flesh that spiritual body of our glory may be forming itself even now, waiting for the sowing in the ground which shall set it free to grow and lift itself out of the bondage of the earth into the liberty of the sun.

They are changed. They are learning perhaps painfully to develop this new body, from which the husk has fallen away. As yet they have not the new vehicle, though they have lost the old, their spirit fumbles for its manifestation in that Mediatory Kingdom where they wait. They are prisoners, but they are prisoners of hope, for their new faculties and powers are forming themselves in that unknown land. Once again, as it were, they go through the processes of birth, as at the beginning of their earthly life they went through them in their mother’s womb. A new body is forming itself in the shelter of that land we call Purgatory, where evil cannot seize upon the growing form as it seized upon that which was cast off. For those who escape the bondage of the earth, the Old Testament fierceness of natural law, the continual harrying and preying of evil seeking to maintain its life parasitically through ours, Purgatory even if viewed as a place of retribution as well as of cleansing must also be a place of refreshing, light and peace.

For there only good wills move in an orderly growth, an evolution which sin has not corrupted and debased. There the mists of earth can no longer hide from us the stars which are the burning of spirits aflame with the love of God, the angelic hierarchies that fill a universe in which our earth and its humanity holds only a small space. The shelter of the furrow is paradoxically the freedom of the sky. The prisoner of hope is the freeman of love.