November 2, 2023
The Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed
All Souls Day
Dia de los Muertos
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Blessed be the souls of the just
Their hope is full of immortality. Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.
Joy Clarkson loves to write about the darker days and times and corners of the Christian faith. Our ancient churches encourage this kind of thinking, especially when the heat isn’t yet turned on and the lights are dim, the candles flicker, and the stool in the corner of the sanctuary is made of stone. But come in, bring a cushion, have a seat and listen to whispers and shudders and breezes, the fluttering of ghosts, all around.
All-hallows-tide, the triad of days from the final days of October to the second of November, draws back the veil of time and reminds us that angels and saints and all the company of heaven are looking out for us. But it also reminds us that other people die and we will too. Time and eternity huddle together like parishioners on a windy day.
Here we are, just thirty days from the first Sunday of Advent, this is the Day of the Dead. Coco, come guide us. Actually it’s Miguel who would do the guiding. And the plot is more complicated than I remembered.
Miguel is busy playing his guitar, so I don’t want to bother him. But his intense commitment to his family, to his ancestors, to their music and religion inspires me even without his presence. On this day especially I’m inclined to remember my personal “saints,” all the “faithful departed” in my family and friends.
In the time of their visitation they shall shine, and they shall dart about as sparks through stubble.
I think of Kathy, whose family was killed in a head-on collision when we were thirteen. She was in my 8th grade class. I remember a a great-great uncle who died in the epidemic of Spanish flu in 1918 just as he returned from the battlefield in France. Not by bullets but by germs, and he was gone.
My friends, my family. My dad, my mom. All four grandparents, my uncles and aunts. Mom’s sister Mary Lou, who never married but cared for her nephews and niece as if we were her own. She took me on an overnight train trip from Lincoln to Chicago to Washington DC, and we spent a week with her Aunts Dena and Nettie and watched the Shakespeare Players perform Twelfth Night just west of the Washington Monument. Or was it All’s Well That Ends Well?
Dena and Nettie were sisters of Grandpa Herman, Aunt Mary’s dad. Those girls (and my grandpa) survived the flu epidemic in Logan County, Illinois which killed their brother and others in their family as it spread across the country and the world.
William Maxwell grew up in Logan County. While he was fiction editor for The New Yorker, Mr. Maxwell wrote a book, They Came Like Swallows, about the death of his mom during that flu.
Time and eternity huddling together, like parishioners on a wintry day.
On our first visit to San Antonio we visited four of the five Spanish missions established there by the Franciscans in the early 1700s. Our favorite is Mission Espada built in 1690. Outside the church a few descendants of the first parishioners speak of their families. Those of us who live and breathe will also die.
Come and inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
We pass through and pass on. On a day like today when we honor those who have gone ahead of us, I also catch myself wondering and even wishing for closer glimpses of the road, the kind of glimpses only possible in the midst of the journey, passing from life to death, the certainty of eternity catching and holding me while I slowly learn to surrender.
The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead, and their passing away was thought an affliction. But they are in peace.
(Revelation 7, Psalm 24, 1 John 3, Matthew 11, Matthew 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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