The Cool of the Evening
For the first time in my life, I find myself considering how many years I probably have left to work in, and how best to apportion my energy, where to direct my still thriving desire to learn and to teach, and what I might well leave behind. I feel like a traveler on a long journey, whose shoulders were strong enough to bear all the luggage when he set out, but who finds some relief in shedding one piece after another, until at last, perhaps, he is but a barefoot boy running away from home, with his few things needful tied up in a small sack at the end of a stick. Except, of course, I’m not running away from home. It’s home that is catching up with me.
The old Christian poets, I find, are in this regard both honest and comforting. Death approaches us as inevitably as the evening follows the day. All we have ever seen with our eyes, heard with our ears, and grasped with our minds is involved in this world, yet we are promised what “eye has not seen, nor ear heard,” namely, those inconceivable “things which God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). The fear of those without God is that they will fall from being to nothingness. The promise Christians hold to is quite as fearful: a leap from the only mode of being we have ever known, to the immortal life whereof this world is but an intimation in light and shadow.
Soft as a Bed
So when we pray or we sing in the evening, our minds should turn toward that last of our evenings in the world, and the effect is twofold. It sheds a solemn glory upon our retiring to sleep, and it makes death homely to us, familiar, as soft as a bed. Why should it not be so? To trust in God is to know that the last burden of the flesh will be eased, and the lad or lass with the one thing needful, the faith he carries in his heart, will come home. The poet Herbert, thinking of the death of the body, puts it most strikingly:
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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