NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

Fr. John Oliver

The year was 1923; the place, New England; the poet, Robert Frost. He was nearing fifty, and beginning to feel the weight of dreams unrealized and of hopes that would never come to be. There is a point in life when you begin to discover that so much you thought you could count on, you can’t.

Frost loved the outdoors; many of his poems involve nature themes. But for all the magnificence nature delivers, it can also bring its own kind of melancholy. Close to fifty in 1923, he took in the shifting season around him – all this change – and it became a symbol of the impermanence of life, of youth, of beauty. Look around; everything is constantly changing and nothing lasts forever.

He noticed, for example, that buds first appear in spring as a lovely but fleeting gold, and that the hue quickly disappears. And he saw that flowers are quick to rise to glory, but they, too, die and do not last. He was seeing leaves develop beautifully, but eventually grow brittle and fall to the ground, just as humanity fell from Paradise in the Garden of Eden to the cold earth of exile from God. Each day begins with dawn light, with dawn hope, but even that fades into mundane daytime.

So, feeling life’s fleetingness and the fragility of it all, Frost puts pensive pen to paper and writes this:

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold, Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing gold can stay.

Gallup is a polling and analytics company that recently released their Mood of the Nation survey. Unsurprising to any who have their nose to the wind, satisfaction with the state of our nation is the lowest it’s been in two decades. In ten major areas – among them, overall quality of life, the opportunity for a person to get ahead by working hard, the moral atmosphere – Americans are feeling that it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.

Why? Because for all our hope, all our optimism, nothing gold can stay. So much you thought you could count on, you grow to learn you can’t. Everything is constantly changing, and nothing lasts forever. Just when we think we have something beautiful and lasting, life happens; when we think we found someone who will remain true, life happens; when we think we have finally gotten some financial breathing room, life happens; when we think our bodies are beginning to feel normal again, life happens; when we think we know what to expect, life happens. And the illu- sion of control is revealed to be just that – an illusion.

So, if nothing gold can stay – if everything is constantly changing and we can’t really count on the things we thought we could – what is a person to do?

That calls to mind the Divine Liturgy’s Great Entrance: those moments when celebrants solemnly circle the Nave while carrying the chalice of wine and the diskos of bread, remembering Christ’s own solemn journey through Jerusalem to His Passion and the Cross, where the Lamb would be slain and lay down His life for the life of the world.

Later, Christ the Bridegroom will emerge from the “bridal chamber” of the Sanctuary, to give Himself fully to His Bride, the Church, in Holy Communion.

Between those two moments, the Entrance and the Communion, a quiet prayer is offered in the Sanctuary, so important that it is uttered three times: “The Lord is my strength, my firm foundation, my refuge and my deliverer. The Lord is my strength, my firm foundation, my refuge and my deliverer. The Lord is my strength, my firm foundation, my refuge and my deliverer.”

There is only one remedy for the inevitable disappointments of life, and He is found inside the Church. It is Christ, and the Holy Sacraments are the primary way we reach for Him and He reaches for us. We have no personal relationship with Christ apart from a churchly relationship with Christ. At every Matins service on Sunday mornings, we recite Psalm 63: “O God, my God, unto Thee I rise early at dawn. My soul hath thirsted for Thee; how often hath my flesh longed after Thee in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered. So in the sanctuary have I appeared before Thee to see Thy power and Thy glory.” There is no churchless Christ and there is no Christless church.

We speak here not of brooding detachment or emotional deadness, but of surrender. Yes, we humans do get our hopes up – atmospherically high at times – but that’s simply part of life. Yes, we get let down, sometimes crushingly low, which is part of life, too. We are, after all, human.

However, we don’t give our whole heart – our identity, our security, our deepest faith – over to anything that was never designed to handle it. We open ourselves to life and to hope and to each other, but we reserve the priceless part of us for the Pearl of Great Price: Christ alone, as when the prophet Job cries out, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

With autumn comes change. Nothing gold can stay? Thank God for that, for in our quiet pain amidst the shards of hopes dashed yet again, we are drawn toward the only Person who does.