ASTERS AND CHRYSANTHEMUMS

A melancholy Dutch poet, J.C. Bloem, wrote a poem about autumn that begins, "Asters en chrysanthemen / Het leven staat allengs stil."(Asters and chrysanthemums / Life gradually slows to a halt." Today (as I write, it's already evening) is, in France, le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead; in England, All Souls; for the Church, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Chrysanthemums decorate tombs, and we remember those whom we have lost to our world. Some of us pray for their souls in the hereafter, perhaps hoping thereby to shorten their purgatory. Some just remember with tenderness and affection. Some still mourn, filled with the torn selvedge of grief.
I am always struck by the heart's selection of those whom it truly mourns. Embarrassingly, they are not always all our nearest and dearest: one may mourn one parent more than the other, one sibling more than another, one friend more than another equally close; and sometimes one finds oneself genuinely mourning someone one only met a few times. The heart has reasons reason knows not of, indeed.
The history of our faith's theology furishes many details concerning our future after that passage called Death: I wonder how many people know or believe them today. My mother, nearly 90 and suffering from Alzheimer's, once had a late-night conversation with me in which death came up. I asked her what she felt about it as it neared; and I've always remembered her answer. Ï don't know what happens,"she said, "but I don't think we're meant to know. That's what faith is: you go into the dark, trusting."
Many people believe that the dead are with us still, watching, encouraging, and sometimes even helping us. Our affectionate remembrance of them, our attention to their resting-place, and our prayers for them and for us, and for what still joins us to them: these are the quiet trusting joys that fill this day.

THE EVEN AND THE HALLOWS

Now that Hallowe'en is spreading like an oil-slick across the Atlantic and filling Western Europe with 8-year-old ghouls and wrapped sweets, it may be useful to remind the ignorant, and even the uncaring, about its morrow. In France, All Souls Day, November 2, has long been known as le jour des morts, the Day of the Dead, marked by visits to churchyard and cemetery and by a tidal wave of small-flowered chrysanthemums, bought at the local grocery shop or florist's to be placed on the tombs of the faithful departed. Now, even in the land of laïcité (state-sponsored secularism), Hallowe'en is spreading irresistibly; and so the two slices of the sandwich are in place, but the ham is absent and forgotten. And even in America the Religious, I'm not sure how many people remember that the scary fun of Hallowe'en is intended to scare the Powers of Darkness and not the populace.  For those Powers, the old folk wisdom said, walk the earth on this even, and we light candles in grinning heads to keep them away.
They walk the earth partly because the year's dark days are here, now after harvest, and partly because the morrow is a feast they hate with all their might. For it is the celebration of All the Saints: the entire community of those who have returned God's love with a power and might that is exceptional; an intensity the rest of us can venerate but likely not attain; and in whom we rejoice because they inspire us and, many believe, pray for us because they know our need as even we do not.
We have all met, upon occasion, someone of real and transparent goodness, and from such persons something like a light shines forth that is doubtless at the origin of the halo with which painters endow them. Such a gentle light surrounds a person simply good. What of a saint? I don't think I've ever been in the physical presence of one; but I have seen on photo and on film, and read the writings of, some I canonise in my heart and the Church may soon if it has not already. And from such persons there comes a power, a penetrating influence that is like a vast radiance: quiet often, unassuming even, not always uncontroversial but impossible to ignore.
Now imagine a room, a palace, a firmament full of such singular intensities. Can our minds and hearts even begin to encompass the light and the cosmic joy of it? It would intimidate us; it would frighten us. And if it would frighten us, think of what it must do to those sad souls and spirits who cannot abide the love of God and have chosen endless night rather than have to encounter it. No wonder that at the mere approach of its mere commemoration they gibber and howl and stalk our streets in despair. They want our blood, or at least our happiness: they are mad with jealousy and bent on our destruction. So we light fires and candles, we sing songs, we eat and drink and pray, and we hug our children in their small disguises; because we are creatures of hope, and tomorrow comes the light of all God's darlings, united for our good.

ALL SOULS

Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch, 'All Souls Day' (1910)

   ‘The souls of the faithful departed’. What does it mean, and what do we do with them? Where are they? Up there? Out there? Down there? Nowhere? For all our advances in knowledge of the Universe, we have no idea. The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, is undiscovered still. All we know for sure is what Jesus told the Good Thief, from cross to cross: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise’. That thief is one of those we remember today.

   So what we do with them is remembrance. That they be not forgotten. Lest we forget. Being forgotten, we sense, is the worst that can happen to one who has died, in this world. We remember our own dead men and women: parents, spouses, friends, sometimes and grievingly, children; we remember them with affection, we sometimes miss them, sometimes not; we re-call them, call them up in our minds, their faces, their voices (often the hardest to remember), their way of walking, their eccentricities; and in doing so we realise that we live in a web of the living and the dead, that the unforgotten are still with us, that we are not alone.

   And yet, as the Bible text on famous men reminds us, there are those who are forgotten, as individuals. Them we remember as members of a larger unit: those who died in the inferno of World War I, the numberless martyrs killed by tyrants and by the enraged because of their faith in God, those small ordinary folk who never got into the news or the history books but lived their faith truly and kindly in a corner of Dorset, of the Alsace, of Pomerania, of Tuscany or of Massachusetts. These we re-member: we put them together again, we imagine them again, we bring them briefly back to the life they departed, in order to honour them as they were perhaps not honoured before.

   Where they are, we don’t know. But we trust, which is the essence of faith and hope. We trust that they are in the warmth and light and joy of the Presence of God. We trust that they are filled with the happiness they deserved. We trust that, perhaps, we too may join them there. One day. One eternal Day.