Over the past few weeks, as I have walked my dog, Beau, throughout the neighborhood, I have been fascinated with the prevalence of Halloween decorations on houses. Many of these decorations are extensive—not just a pumpkin or two, but life-sized ghouls flapping in the wind and fake displays of gravestones with skeletons emerging from the ground. I have not only found some of these displays to be curious; some are downright humorous. While there is a Christian precedent for mocking death (one can see glimpses in the Día de los Muertos tradition in Mexico), I do wonder how many of my Rosemont neighbors even know what Halloween is.
It is, of course, the Eve of All Saints’ Day (All Hallows’ Eve, hence “Hallowe’en”). Amid all the fascination with dressing up in costumes and displaying graveyards in front yards, we live in a death denying culture. Death long ago moved out of the home. People don’t die at home as much as in the past. Funerals are outsourced to the funeral home industry. Bodies are less frequently present for funerals in churches. We are, quite simply, scared of death. If the great secular feast of Halloween were a religious mocking of death, a sound theological statement might be made. But I fear that Halloween is just another occasion with religious origins that has been co-opted by a death denying society.
But of course, within the Church, we are meant to talk about death. Every day of our lives is one day closer to our deaths. We don’t need to meditate on that morbidly but, instead, with honesty and hope in life that perdures beyond death. And talking about death is all the more important in a culture that doesn’t know how to talk maturely and wholesomely about bodies. We either idolize a particular version of bodies and then scorn those that don’t fit the coveted mold, or we are ashamed of our bodies. We treat other people’s bodies with disrespect, and we fail to honor the dignity of other human beings. And this means that we don’t know what to do with dead bodies, because we imagine an immortal soul continuing to live while the body just hangs around like an empty shell. We forget, too easily, that one day, God will raise body and soul together. If the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, then our bodies, surely, are deeply important.
It’s a bold statement we make this time of year when we celebrate first All Saints’ Day and then All Souls’ Day. Low Mass will be celebrated at Good Shepherd on Saturday, November 1, at 9:30 a.m. for All Saints’ Day, but we will keep the feast within its octave (as the prayer book allows) on Sunday, when, appropriately, Sloane Mills will be welcomed into the Body of Christ through the Sacrament of Baptism. On All Saints’ Day, we remember the communion of saints, all those, living and dead, who are bound together as part of the Church. We especially give thanks for those saints whose lives bore vivid witness to a love for Jesus Christ, who testified to the Gospel in their lives, some of whom are known by name and appear on our Church’s liturgical calendar, others of whom we will never know by name. Tradition has spoken of the Church Triumphant (those who have made it into the nearer presence of God), the Church Expectant (those who are still in their pilgrimage towards that nearer presence after death), and the Church Militant (those of us still on our earthly pilgrimage). The communion of saints witnesses to the inability of death to fracture the Church. In each Mass and in our regular prayers, we are “knit together. . . in one communion and fellowship,” as the collect for All Saints’ Day tells us. Death has lost its sting.
And then on All Souls’ Day, we pray for those who have died and are beloved of us, and we ask for God’s mercy as they continue to grow more into the likeness of God in their continuing pilgrimage in Christ, even though we can’t see them any longer. the living and the dead. For me, the All Souls’ Day Requiem Mass is one of the most moving liturgies of the year. As I read the parochial necrology, I read the names of people I have never met, former rectors of this parish, your own loved ones, and the names of my own family members. In its old-fashioned form, the Requiem Mass focuses primarily on the souls of the departed and on the hope, in Christ, that their bodies will one day be raised in glory, too. We believe that those loved ones can and do pray for us as well in our earthly pilgrimage.
In a time when even our liturgies can tend towards self-obsession, the All Souls’ Day Requiem moves us away from ourselves and towards those we love but see no longer and, ultimately, towards the unending mercy of God. We hear a glorious setting of the Requiem Mass not as a concert but within the liturgical context for which it was originally written. For the congregation, the Requiem Mass may seem like a more passive affair than usual, but this is so only if we literalize a need to vocalize words. The Requiem Mass actually allows space for us to offer actively the deepest prayers and gestures from within our hearts, as we mourn the loss of our loved ones and hand them completely over to the care of almighty God.
I’m touched, when reading the necrology each year, that on paper and in our prayers, lay people, priests, and bishops all exist on one plane in Christ. Death is the great humbling experience of life, when the mighty are brought low and the lowly lifted high. In death, “there is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all . . . are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the All Souls’ Day Requiem, both the living and dead are united intimately in the Eucharistic feast. At this time of year, as we approach All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, the veil between this world and the next seems more porous, thinner than usual. And in a world terrified of death, this is a beautiful thing.
However busy your lives may be, I heartily encourage you to be present on Sunday for the Lord’s Day and the celebration of All Saints’. Come to pray and offer your support for Sloane, who will be “sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” And then join us again on Monday at 7 p.m. to acknowledge the reality of death in a death-denying culture and to give thanks that death has lost its sting. God’s mercy is far greater than death will ever be. Thanks be to God.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle