Matched pairs: sun and moon, suffering and joy

We are coming to the end of the Easter season… why does it feel like time goes faster when you’re celebrating than focusing on penance and fasting?!

This Thursday is the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, although most dioceses move the celebration to Sunday—because most wouldn’t make the weekday Holy Day of Obligation. We’re too busy with urgent things…

How many are truly important? Certainly there are many necessary things in life that don’t directly involve religion or worship… but, are there really?

My thoughts are lost (in these moments before I wake the kids up for school) pondering what Christ’s Ascension was like for Mary… I can only relate my recent experience of having my oldest son move a 20-hour drive away. Even though when he was at 4-hour drive distance I might see him only 3-4x a year, the distance makes him truly feel farther. As difficult as this has been, we talk more; I think about him more, long for him more…

I can only imagine what that might have been like for Mary once Jesus definitively left this earth, to prepare a place for us…

Pensive and sad, through sense of joy to be,
     Thine eyes full-flooded with the bliss of pain,
     And dawning on thy springtime lips the stain
Of those dear wounds that solved life's mystery;
O pure and Blessed Maid, surely for thee
     The song of birds, the stream's sweet, wordless strain,
     The golden splendor of the ripening grain,
Brought thoughts of thy Divine Maternity.
So breaks the morn of days that never set,
     On lands untouched by Time's brief rhapsody,
          With flushes of a far-time sorrow in the sky,
     And dreamy drifts of clouds anear the sea,
          That ever pale, yet aye seem loth to die,
Like virgin hopes that know not sorrow yet.
-by William P. Coyne; from 'The Ave Maria,' 1890.

The following is a “bonus” - but what a beautiful reflection on the sun and moon as metaphors for Jesus and Mary, especially in “light” of the Ascension and our return to “Ordinary Time.” But it also is a reflection on the joys and sorrows of life—that ultimate paradox that (at least in my life and what I read of the saints, sense from stories and personal testimonies) really is the only source of true peace. It’s not when we do away with suffering or difficulties, but allow them to orbit together and share the same source of light that they seem to find their place to co-exist.

I hear no protest blazing from the Sun
when the Moon appears upon Its blue skies.
     No such, 'I rule the day! You rule the night!
     Be off with you! You cannot match my light! '
She comes and witnesses Sun shadows,
     and the bright colors She grays by Her light,
the dancing hues among the flower beds,
the flickering greens among the leaves.
Sharing They the luminous firmament,
One illuminating, One delighting,
     Both fulfilling an orbit's task and right,
     lifting hearts and raising hope with Their flight.
-by William Coyne; https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/matched-pair/

I had never heard of William Coyne. Apparently, he was an Irish statistician, government official and university professor, author and poet, husband and father who lived at the end of the 19th century.