4 | NOVEMDIALES LUCTUS
4
NOVEMDIALES LUCTUS
The Frankincense scent wafting around the altar is both bitter and sweet, dry as the desert wind, yet warm, like the old pages of a Bible.
It ascended, curling slowly through the air with a dignity as ancient as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, or the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus often prayed in a grotto in solitude on the southeastern side of this mountain, near Tabgha and Capernaum. The thurible, emitting the incense, had in it the resin of suffering and the echo of sacred things in psalms or canticles. Absent of frivolity in a sacrifice of scent, it carries within it the breath of prophets, the sorrow of mothers, the prayers of forgotten saints.
There were theologians who looked at the rising smoke as the material world being spiritualized, the finite matter consumed in flame, exuding fragrant offering to the Infinite. The incense became the outward sign of the “divinization of the universe”—the slow, aching process by which all creation is drawn toward its fulfillment in God. Others say, a glimpse of the deep law of spiritualization. This fragrant smoke consents to its own transcendence. It becomes an offering, a memory, an ascent. So it is with the soul we mourn; not extinguished, but transmuted—drawn into the fire of the world’s becoming. The incense, rising in solemn spirals, reveals to us the path of all created things: to burn, to give, to rise.
For nine days of Novendial Mass (or Novemdiale, from the Latin novem = nine and dies = day), the incense coils upward, curling like breath into the unseen realms. It is invoked upon the death of the Vicar of Christ—the Pope himself—when the Chair of Peter stands empty and the breath of heaven stilled the voice that once guided nations.
For nine days, men and women, dazed by loss and disoriented by silence, paused in their relentless striving and considered the one truth that no empire, no intellect, no age has escaped: death. And in that confrontation lies the heart of existentialist question—though they dressed it elegantly in the garments of resistance and weariness. Over nine days, those who remain are given time and structure to face the contemplative architecture for the living left behind, to sit with uncertainty, to ask the unresolvable questions that death provokes: What endures? What was the meaning of this life? What will become of me?
It doesn't offer easy answers, but creates a space in which the community is permitted, even compelled, to reckon with mystery. The repeated rituals become an existential scaffolding; a slow act of reassembling the self, not by denying the absurd, but by choosing to continue within it. And as reflected, the mourning began as a recollection of old and fresh memories; but also, a poignant resistance to despair.
In the days of the Novendial, when sorrow hung like dusk upon the heart, we looked intimately at this simple act. For in it, we are not merely honoring the dead—we are taking part in the slow liturgy of the universe, the Mass of the world. The days of mourning and funeral rites, particularly in the context of the Roman Catholic Church and papal funerals. Each day typically includes a Requiem Mass, and the services are both liturgical and ceremonial. It is part of the traditional protocol outlined and the iron law of the Apostolic Constitution Universi Dominici Gregis, which governs the period sede vacante (when the papal seat is vacant) and the election of a new pope.
Prayers, hymns, readings, and reflection revolved typically in memory of the departed, of gratitude, bits of anger, of silence, forgiveness, acceptance, hope, continuity, and hopefully, closure. It is a sentimental observance of custom, a sacred lamentation that spans nine days, each one steeped in mystery, ritual, and prayer.
The soul, like the smoke, is not lost but lifted by the breath of prayer and memory into the great movement of Christifying. So, they said. Nothing is wasted. Not the tears, not the silence, not the ash. All is gathered. All is drawn upward. Most notably, this mourning rite is the resonance of sorrow, yet also a herald of divine promise, offered for the repose of the soul now departed into eternity.
Outside papal contexts, novendial prayers or masses may also be held more generally in Catholic communities as a form of nine-day mourning devotion. It is an ancient covenant—a solemn vigil for the dead, and a reverent preparation for the choosing of a new shepherd.
The Church, in her long memory, knew. She understood what the philosophers only began to mutter in their cafés and cloisters—that man, stripped of illusion, must face the abyss not with defiance alone, but with solemnity, ritual, and the hopeful teleology of temporal living.
The Novendialis is indeed, undeniably a ritualistic sentimental farewell. It is the soul’s slow procession through the valley of shadows, with every mass, every prayer, every silence, candle held against the encroaching dark.
Where the existentialist sees absurdity, the Novendialis offers mystery. Where they find only the scream of freedom, the Church believed on immortality, of eternity. And although no answer is shouted from the heavens, something stirs in the smoke of incense and the chant of the mourners—something eternal, noble, defiant.
In that, perhaps, the soul finds inexplicably the symbolic eulogy of eternal peace. ♰
