November's Sweet Silent Thoughts

As strange as it may sound—because he was never absent and we did many things together—there was always a distance between my Father and me.  Maybe the space between us was the absence of words.  My life quickly ordered itself around language: first talking and then reading and writing.  My father did very little of these.  

 

Because I was interested in priesthood, I left home at age fourteen to attend a Catholic boarding school.  Before I departed, my father drew me aside and showed me a silver dollar that he kept in his billfold.   I knew of its existence, because, like most sons during the doldrums of childhood, I had often examined my Father’s effects.  The silver dollar had been in his billfold for so long, it had molded a permanent impression in the soft leather.  

 

My Father gave the silver dollar a story.  “Son, my Father gave me this coin when I went to Korea.  I’ve had it in my billfold so long, its engravings are disappearing.  I’ve always carried it with me.  This morning I went to the bank and got a silver dollar for you, to carry with you as you leave home.”

 

I put the silver dollar in my own billfold, aware that something important had passed between my Father and me.  A man, who made little use of words, had found a way to say more than words could convey.

 

Sadly, sometime in the year away that followed, another student stole my billfold.  I eventually found it, stripped of its few contents and discarded in a waste barrel.  Of course the silver dollar was gone.  

 

My Father responded as he always did, with very few words.  Such things didn’t matter, he said.  We’d get another silver dollar.  

But we never did, and I don’t know why.  I do know that the memory of that coin still afflicts me.  I lost something too precious for a billfold to hold.  I lost what will never be found. 

 

In November, the Church’s year comes to a close.  Nature dies around us, and we recall our dead.  The Church asks us to remember that history itself—the world’s history and our own stories—will have an end.  And when we resolutely stare ahead to the close, we can’t help but to mourn what was lost along the way. 

 

Shakespeare captured melancholy November in a sonnet.

 

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 

I summon up remembrance of things past, 

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: 

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, 

And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe, 

And moan the expense of many a vanished sight: 

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er 

The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, 

Which I new pay as if not paid before. 

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, 

All losses are restored and sorrows end.

 

For the Bard, a true life’s love redeems what was the lost.  And yet we know that even true loves are sundered from us.  They slip beyond grasp and ken, but not what we surrender to God.

 

November reveals something of God.  God is that place, that person, that which lies beyond places and persons, where nothing is lost.  “For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?” (Wis 11: 24-25).  

 

Christ sought out Zacchaeus.  He was lost to Israel, but not to God, “for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost” (Lk 19:10).  Christ is the great seeker of souls.  He recovers what we cannot.  In him I will find father and coin.  Nothing is lost to God, the mystery from which all comes, and to which all returns.