November 2023 Newsletter
Dear Una Voce Maine friends,
Greetings,
As I get older, I increasingly appreciate the Church’s traditional designation of November as a month of remembrance. In no small part, I am sure this is because with each year more of the people whom I have loved and been shaped by are in the life behind me and not in the life around me or ahead. Thus remembrance occupies an ever greater share of my regular prayers.
With the liturgical calendar, the Church offers us what might be called the pinnacle of remembrance, with All Saints Day on the first of November followed immediately by All Souls Day. Taken together, we are called to take a pause from our daily lives to remember the faithful who have passed before us, to pray that God will grant them peace and eternal rest, and to ask them to pray for us as we anticipate in faith the day we join them.
Another liturgical tradition which increasingly occupies my Novembers is the Office of the Dead, a centuries-old part of the monastic Divine Hours. At first, I prayed the Office solely on All Saints Day, which is among its primary designated uses. But increasingly, and again as more of my family and friends have passed on, I have taken to praying the Office as an Octave. Between the psalms for each of the three nocturns and the readings taken from the wisdom books, the Office offers a foundation for those times when emotions are raw, as well as a renewed focus on the Last Things which, the Church reminds us, will one day face us all.
This year, of course, our remembrances take on a significance and sorrow that I’m sure none of us had ever imagined, as we are just days beyond the tragic events of last week in Lewiston. Eighteen members of the community were cut down in the middle of their week and the fullness of their lives, and several others were wounded, all by a sole gunman who subsequently took his own life.
I have no words that can fully convey the shock and sorrow we feel for the lives lost or permanently altered, nor any that can adequately console the victims’ grieving families and friends or the community of which they were so integral a part. But as we pause to observe the Church’s tradition of remembrance, let us first hold in our hearts and minds the souls of those who have so recently and suddenly departed.
And may we remember also that this Catholic period of remembrance comes at the end of our liturgical cycle, and that what lies ahead is our renewed anticipation of the coming of the Lord, who dries all tears and makes all things new.
As we wait, let us pray:
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiscant in pace. Amen
Jeff Rowe
Readings
Excerpt: The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite
Fr. Michael Fiedrowicz. Angelico Press, pp.61-62
Liturgies grow, as the great old houses of worship grew, over centuries. In fact, the traditional Mass resembles many of the great old churches in the process of its origination. Such monuments were not constructed within a short amount of time like modern buildings, but rather they grew up over the course of centuries under the hands of generations who were working for eternity. They were endowed with the works of stonemasons, sculptors, carpenters, and painters; each of them provided his own contribution, but all were filled with the single purpose of worthily fashioning the House of God. Just as virtually every part of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice from the floor to the roof was added in one century or another from various foreign countries, the Christian liturgy was formed from the treasures of Jerusalem, Rome, and Byzantium. Bricks from various cultural groups and time periods were brought together and used for its construction. Elements from the Jewish synagogue service (readings), the ancient Roman style of prayer (Canon), oriental Christianity (Kyrie eleison), monastic spirituality (silent prayers), and others converged here. As elements from diverse origins were assumed into the Roman Mass, its form attained its unique universality.
The traditional Mass in the Roman rite is an ancient building, stamped with many centuries and styles, often amended and further embellished, sometimes restored here and there, a building in which one can trace, part by part, the century of its origin, but only in the rarest of cases identify the artist who designed this or that element and added it to the whole. . . .It is precisely in this anonymity that the greatness of the traditional Mass lies: ‘Since Holy Mass had no author..., everyone was free to believe and feel that it was something eternal, not made by human hands.’ (M. Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness)”
The Liturgical Year
Very Rev. Dom Prosper Guéranger Abbot of Solesmes, 1833-1875
November 19 – Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231)
Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew king of Hungary, feared God from her infancy, and increased in piety as she advanced in age. She was married to Lewis, landgrave of Hesse and Thuringia, and devoted herself to the service of God and of her husband. She used to rise in the night and spend a long time in prayer; and moreover she devoted herself to works of mercy, diligently caring for widows and orphans, the sick and the poor. In time of famine she freely distributed her store of corn. She received lepers into her house, and kissed their hands and feet; she also built a splendid hospital, where the poor might be fed and cared for. On the death of her husband, she, in order to serve God with greater freedom, laid aside all worldly ornaments, clothed herself in a rough tunic, and entered the Order of Penance of St. Francis.
November 24 – Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591)
The growing disinclination of the people for social prayer was threatening the irreparable destruction of piety, when in the sixteenth century the divine goodness raised up Saints, whose teaching and holiness responded to the needs of the new times. Doctrine does not change: the asceticism and mysticism of that age transmitted to the succeeding centuries the echo of those that had gone before. . . .
John of the Cross was born of pious parents at Hontiveros in Spain. From his infancy it was evident how dear he would be to the Virgin Mother of God, for at five years of age having fallen down a well, he was held up by our Lady in her arms, so that he sustained no injury. . . As a young man, he devoted himself to the service of the sick in the hospital of Medina del Campo. Here he showed the ardor of his charity by undertaking the vilest offices; and his example incited others to devote themselves to the same charitable deeds. But as God called him still higher, he entered the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, where he was made priest in obedience to his superiors; and in his ardor for more severe discipline and a more austere manner of life, he obtained their leave to observe the primitive rule of the Order
“The soul,” he wrote, “is to attain to a certain sense, to a certain divine knowledge, most generous and full of sweetness, of all human and divine things which do not fall within the common-sense and natural perceptions of the soul; it views them with different eyes now, for the light and grace of the Holy Ghost differ from those of sense, the divine from the human. (The Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Ch 9)
November 30 – Saint Andrew, Apostle
This feast is destined each year to terminate with solemnity the cycle which is at its close, or to add luster to the new one which has just begun. It seems, indeed, fitting that the Christian year should begin and end with the cross, which has merited for us each of those years which it has pleased the divine goodness to grant us, and which is to appear, on the last day, in the clouds of heaven, as the seal put on time.
We should remember that Saint Andrew is the Apostle of the Cross. To Peter, Jesus has given firmness of faith; to John, warmth of love; the mission of Andrew is to represent the Cross of his divine Master. Now it is by these three, faith, love, and the Cross, that the Church renders herself worthy of her Spouse. Everything she has or is, bears this threefold character. Hence it is that after the two Apostles just named, there is none who holds such a prominent place in the universal Liturgy as Saint Andrew.
Andrew, the Apostle, born at Bethsaida, a town of Galilee, was brother of Peter, and disciple of John the Baptist. Having heard his master say, speaking of Christ: Behold the Lamb of God! he followed Jesus, and brought to him his brother also. When, afterwards, he was fishing with his brother in the sea of Galilee, they were both called, before any of the other Apostles, by our Lord, who, passing by, said to them: Come after me; I will make you to be fishers of men.