All Souls Day. All Hallows Eve. All Saints Day. It all bleeds together.
When I was a priest. It seems ages ago. Just 6 months now.
I wrote about this season a lot. And preached of it even more often. I had studied the traditions, the devotions, and freely shared this information.
Religious texts are full of verses, alluding to suffering, death, dying, the soul's journey beyond the death of the body, time, and into eternity. Yes. Some texts are clearer than others. But the context of all are often obscured by one's own bias and history, culture, or the language in which it was originally written.
Tradition and interpretation is relevant, exegesis and eisegesis, and very often the interpretive lens is the respective church or community an individual belongs to. What power the cleric has over the minds and hearts...
Unworthy of the responsibility most of the time. And I include myself. When I had been a priest, in times past, I used the interpretive lens of the Catholic Church. Often times, the Church given its multifaceted history, has had numerous interpretations and no settled on version. But to the uber-ortho Catholic, there is the hard right-wing ready to insist upon just one-very-narrow-slice-of-interpretation with the posthumous imprimatur of Mother Angelica and EWTN, Inc.
For the rest, there were catechisms, encyclicals, the writings of saints, biblical scholars’ commentaries, and patristic writings. But even these were not uniform or of one mind. The old Raccolta could be a source of devotional prayers that over the centuries had been given the approval of various pontiffs, or a more streamlined and modern version of this approved by Paul VI could be used. In fact, there were many general instructions, not just of the revised Missal but of all the reformed rites of the Church that could be treasure troves of what the Church still taught about marriage, penance, baptism, the eucharist, death, the life of the soul after death, etc.
Resources. So many go-to sources.
And it all boiled down to this. For me.
All Souls Day. All Saints Day. Bleeding together. The dead. The living. Our loved ones no longer with us, and we miss them. And we know we too shall depart this mortal coil one day.
Grief. Anxiety. Fear. Guilt. Shame. Remorse. Fear. All are resurrected on All Souls Day. These are the ghouls, wolfmen, gargoyles, and zombies that haunt.
Death is never the end. Not for the spiritually inclined. It cannot be. And so at funeral liturgies, a source of comfort is offered in the form of assurances. Prayers offered to people grieving the loss of a loved one: Words that transcend time, space, or even religion: “Saints of God, come to her aid! Come, angels of the Lord! Receive her soul and present her to God the Most High.”
This age-old invocation of ancestors, to come to one’s aid, is a primordial tradition that goes back to cave-dwelling humanity, from what anthropologic discoveries have revealed. Hundreds of thousands of years, transcending religious and cultural boundaries.
I remember a Vietnamese couple in a predominantly Vietnamese-American church community explain it to me one time, before the altar where All-Souls remembrance candles were being lit. In pre-Catholic times, there had been a kind of ancestor worship, they explained. Prayers would be offered to the deceased loved ones in a domain beyond time or space, but somehow, they could see and hear those of us who dwelled on earth. A candle would be lit. A prayer offered.
I asked them, “How is it different now?”
There was a pause. “It’s through Christ now. That is the difference. We recognize that they live in Christ. But we still speak to them, they still hear us. Through Christ, who gives them life.”
I am sure I am paraphrasing a little bit. But that is the gist of it.
And it fits with another tradition I am aware of, which I first read decades ago. In chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna comes to realize that he is in the presence of the One, the Deity Itself. “You are the supreme brahman, the ultimate, the supreme abode and purifier, the absolute truth and the eternal divine person. You are the primal god, transcendental and original, and you are the unborn and all-pervading beauty. All the great sages such as Narada, Asita, Devala, and Vyasa proclaim this of you, and now you yourself are declaring it to me.”
Another deep Hindu text, the Devi Mahatmya offers a Goddess-centric version of the same experience of encountering the transcendent, “She creates this entire universe, both moving and unmoving. It is she who, when propitious, grants the best to humans and shows the way for their final liberation. She is the supreme knowledge, the cause of final liberation, and eternal.”
Life. Death. Eternity.
All Souls Day bleeds into All Saints Day. But in some ways the All Souls side of the coin is less complicated. It is less encumbered by the dogma of November 1st. Because when we start getting into the Lives of the Saints—the great Saints, sure thing—but what about the roguish ones? The ones that the Church declared as Saints but subsequently we are learning some rather unsaintly things about them? Even some recent ones?
Aaaaah. Maybe now I get it. That quote. Or non-quote. Perhaps whether or not Dorothy Day ever said isn't the point. “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
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