"There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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St. John Eudes
- Prosper of Aquitaine (+c.455), De gratia Dei et libero arbitrio contra Collatorem 22.61
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“He [Satan] will set up a counter-Church which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ. In desperate need for God, whom he nevertheless refuses to adore, modern man in his loneliness and frustration will hunger more and more for membership in a community that will give him enlargement of purpose, but at the cost of losing himself in some vague collectivity.”
“Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops.”
- Fulton Sheen
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- C.S. Lewis
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"But if, in any layman who is indeed imbued with literature, ignorance of the Latin language, which we can truly call the 'catholic' language, indicates a certain sluggishness in his love toward the Church, how much more fitting it is that each and every cleric should be adequately practiced and skilled in that language!" - Pius XI
"Let us realize that this remark of Cicero (Brutus 37, 140) can be in a certain way referred to [young lay people]: 'It is not so much a matter of distinction to know Latin as it is disgraceful not to know it.'" - St. John Paul II
Grant unto thy Church, we beseech Thee, O merciful God, that She, being gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may be in no wise troubled by attack from her foes. O God, who by sin art offended and by penance pacified, mercifully regard the prayers of Thy people making supplication unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of Thine anger which we deserve for our sins. Almighty and Everlasting God, in whose Hand are the power and the government of every realm: look down upon and help the Christian people that the heathen nations who trust in the fierceness of their own might may be crushed by the power of thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. R. Amen.
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MMM! First night for a warm, comforting quilt. First morning with a chill in the air. Bright blue sky over the Sierra foothills. October 1st.
O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather.
Helen Hunt Jackson
October, that begins with the seasons of angels and ends with the season of the dead, has been made much of by the poets’ hand:
Just before the death of flowers,
And before they are buried in snow,
There comes a festival season
When nature is all aglow.
– Anonymous
***
In the great silence of my favorite month,
October (the red of maples, the bronze of oaks,
A clear-yellow leaf here and there on birches),
I celebrated the standstill of time.
The vast country of the dead had its beginning everywhere:
At the turn of a tree-lined alley, across park lawns.
But I did not have to enter, I was not called yet.
Motorboats pulled up on the river bank, paths in pine needles.
It was getting dark early, no lights on the other side.
I was going to attend the ball of ghosts and witches.
A delegation would appear there in masks and wigs,
And dance, unrecognized, in the chorus of the living.
– Czeslaw Milosz, All Hallow’s Eve
– Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan
***
Across the land a faint blue veil of mist
Seems hung; the woods wear yet arrayment sober
Till frost shall make them flame; silent and whist
The drooping cherry orchards of October
Like mournful pennons hang their shriveling leaves
Russet and orange: all things now decay;
Long since ye garnered in your autumn sheaves,
And sad the robins pipe at set of day.
– Siegfried Sassons, October
***
And many, many more…
It’s all Longfellow here…
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains,and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary
In this glad season, while his sweetest beams
The sun sheds equal o’er the meekened day ;
O, lose me in the green delightful walks
Of Dodington, thy seat serene and plain ;
Where simple Nature reigns ; and every view,
Diffusive, spreads the pure Dorsetian downs,
In boundless prospect. yonder shagged with wood,
Here rich with harvest, and there white with flocks
Meanwhile the grandeur of thy lofty dome,
Far splendid, seizes on the ravished eye.
– James Thompson, Autumn
Keats:My favorite–
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
And less poetically, stacking the firewood in the garage is a sure sign that the “pleasant and sunny spots” will be few and far between anon!
I have spent many Octobers in many different places, and it’s almost inevitably a pretty month, regardless of latitude.
Wish I could provide a poetic comment; I just want to thank God for the beautiful weather these past days: clear blue skies, beautiful autumn colors, cool, fresh air…just hope the rain and wind these next days in West Central Wisconsin won’t ruin the leaves just yet.
Fr. Z,
Thanks so much for including your poetry and “good news wanted” posts. They are one of my most favorite things about WDTPRS. I often email the poems to my family.