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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
November 29, 2024
Reading:
“It is pleasant to walk over the beds of fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves… When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in the graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs… Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old. You need attend no auction to secure a place. There is room enough here… The wood man and hunter shall be your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves…”
Henry David Thoreau
from Last Works, Mark C. Taylor
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
The headstone for Henry David Thoreau is as simple as any could be. It is a very small vertical square, rounded at the top. The only inscription, in raised block letters, reads “Henry.”
One could easily imagine that more could have been said. Our custom now is to include, at least, someone’s full name and the notice of one’s dates of birth and death. Our lives, we believe, deserve some tangible definition, however minimal. We ought to leave behind a marker that can provoke a memory of who we were and when we were blessed with time to be among the living.
By his own headstone, however, Thoreau allowed himself to be counted as one of the leaves. “They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to the dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high.” It’s a form of deep faith.
The transformation of autumn occurs without any sense of struggle. There’s no indication that the trees fight to hold on to their leaves as long as they can, desperately extending time. Quite differently, there is a quiet and magnificent grace to the multiple beauties of the season. The light changes; as does any stroll through the churchyard. The leaves alter the silence of the headstones. Their silence isn’t austere and terrible, as if it announces all that has forever been lost. It seems to be, instead, a sign of the truest sense of waiting – as that last remaining remnant of our lives, when waiting is all that has been left for us, as the hope that never fades nor wholly dies but humbly persists. I find solace in Thoreau’s invitation: “Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves…”
Tomorrow is the last day in the Christian year. It is an ending. Sunday a new season begins. And, as with our ending, this new beginning originates with a sense of waiting, looking expectantly for what is to come, something that will give our lives substance and beauty beyond the mere extension of our time. Our tendency is to want to erase the silence of waiting with a lot of empty noise and false words. ‘Tis the season. But I’ll take a leaf from Thoreau and say that maybe the best of our expectations can only be represented by the simple inscription of a single name, one that brings fulfillment to our own names and all who, in the eyes of God, we are. That single name, whose promise is lofty yet drops to us so softly, is “Christ.”
Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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