Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days:
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

November brings the season of remembering: the decaying of the year, as Autumn yields to Winter, heightens the poignancy of the Commemoration of All Souls and of Remembrance Sunday. Sir Walter Raleigh's poem, Epitaph, seems well suited to these weeks, in which we give thanks for the lives of those whom we have loved and see no longer, and as we remember once more all those whose lives were, and continue to be, cut short by warfare.

The dying year carries within it the seeds of Spring and the consequent promise of new life. In the same way, for Christians, our sombre reflections on and thanksgivings for the lives of those who have died carry within them the hope of resurrection and the consequent promise of eternal life in Christ. After all the heartfelt melancholy of his musings about death, it is this hope of resurrection to which Raleigh finally gives expression in last line of his poem; it is this hope which we are called to proclaim to the world: may God bless us all in our remembering and strengthen us in our proclaiming.