Monday November 3 “bowed low beneath the weight of loss.”
A friend of mine told me over the weekend that s/he doesn’t much like Halloween as a national holiday. “How did fake scary stuff get to be so big a deal?” That conversation stirred a 60 year old memory of another kind of horror story about the dead. When we were in grade school, we were taught that on All Souls’ Day (Nov 2, aka “Day of the Dead”) every time you went into a church and said six Our Fathers, six Hail Marys, and six Glory Be’s you were guaranteed to get one soul out of Purgatory . . . a wacky bit of theology that turned that day, which should have opened out into stillness, beauty, and grief, into a torture chamber. Those 3 sets of sixes were long and then after you left church you would hear a relentless voice say: “But you can get another one out if you go back and do it all over again.” I don’t think kids are introduced to that sort of pious torture any more in RC teaching.
This year All Souls’ Day fell on a Sunday, so with thoughts of scary costumes and the magic 3 six-time prayers (btw, I don’t remember ever being taught who selected which soul in purgatory I was rescuing each time), I began to pray about Sunday’s homily. “What might be a helpful thing to say on this day that, sillinesses aside, calls attention to one of our lives most powerful experiences?” When we say goodbye to someone sacred to us, when we grieve and allow the stillness and weight of loss to come close, spooky can become a vast tenderness. Still, the homily did not turn toward into bashing Halloween ghost costumes or the Christian teaching about Purgatory. “Trick ‘r Treat” is great parent and child play, the stuff of memories, and the ancient teaching about Purgatory evokes a place where people who have died can live a yearning for healing the wounds of their lives; a place, in the teaching, where we humans do not just walk away from the ambiguities with which we lived; a teaching suggesting that the living can have a connection with those who have died, that we can send blessings out into a place that remains silent to us but need not remain absent of love and connection.
All this moved me to open one of my niece Terri’s series of poems about her grandmother. My mom died when she was 102, and had lived the diminishments of her aging with a lot of grace and receptivity. I love the poem and bet you will too.
As has become custom in these posts, I recommend reading “The Living” out loud with pauses. Myself? When I read aloud the last lines make me cry.
Have a good day,
john sj
Today’s Post “The Living”
It’s strange the things people say
after a death, crooked attempts
to comfort. Things like, “Oh,
well she was old. She had a long life.”
or “She was ready to go.” One woman
even said, her hand resting on my shoulder
“Her death was easy; that
should make you happy.”
Happy. Easy. Words I never
put together with death, words I still
can’t quite get my arms around
no matter my wingspan.
And I think, Oh, this stumbling
over language as if it were new,
despite a familiarity with time,
the exhaustion and experience
of years, despite consideration of death,
having greeted that recognizable face before.
It is easy to forget, tangled
in words of comfort,
that the dead
are dead; they do not feel
the pain of departing,
do not need to be consoled.
It is those who are left
who know the burden of sad and hard,
bowed low beneath the weight of loss.
My son will never know her. He will never
understand why when he glares, shoulders
angled back and jaw thrust out
stubborn like her, belligerent and
ready for a fight, I, a fighter too,
can only cry and hold him close.
Terri Breeden