All Souls’ Day — 2 November 2017
Trinity – 12:15 pm
Wisdom 3:1-9 | Psalm 116:10-17 | 1
Corinthians 15:50-58 | John 5:24-27
The
celebration of the Communion of Saints – living and departed – in one form or
another, at one time of year or another, goes back a very long way in the
history of the Church, back into the early days. In the New Testament, and in the earliest
days of the Church, the “saints” – that is, God’s holy ones, God’s holy people
– meant all faithful Christians,
including you and me. But over the years
the celebration came to focus on the extraordinary saints, the heroes of the
faith, especially the martyrs. But we
ordinary folks, and particularly our departed family and friends, seemed to get
left out. Except that we didn’t, really,
because it has been a custom among peoples all over the world to have some
annual celebration or remembrance of our dead ancestors.
The Church, of course, developed and
scheduled Holy Days to compete with and to absorb pre-Christian festivals – a
classic example being the setting of the observance of the birth of Jesus –
about whose actual birthday we have absolutely no idea at all – at the time of
the celebration of the winter solstice. And
of course All Saints’ Day came to be observed in the medieval Western Church –
apparently originally in Ireland – at the season in which departed family were
remembered. (For example, Dia de los Muertos in Mexico and
elsewhere in the Americas.) This settled
into a three-day sequence, centering on All Saints’ Day (November 1), preceded
by All Hallows’ Eve (Hallowe’en) and followed by All Souls’ Day, focusing on
those “ordinary folks” who we had forgotten were also saints.
Meanwhile, under the influence of some of the
less healthy aspects of the theology of St. Augustine, the concern grew that
since human beings are all rotten to the core and on our way in handbaskets to
hell, All Souls’ Day became a day of moaning and whining, with black as the
liturgical color and the chanting of the funeral hymn Dies irae (“Day of wrath, O day of mourning”), perhaps especially
known through musical compositions by Mozart and Verdi, though Gabriel Fauré
declined to set that text in his Requiem Mass.
All of this degenerated into a system of attempts to pray or buy
Grandma’s soul out of purgatory, resulting ultimately in the sale of papal
indulgences, which finally led the German priest Martin Luther to say “Enough!”
and to challenge the whole corrupt system, five hundred years ago this past
Tuesday.
Protestantism
on the whole dumped the All Souls’ Day business, considering it irretrievable. Some Reformed churches dumped All Saints’ Day
as well. Anglicans, naturally, waffled,
at least until modern times. But folk
religion is not always wrong, and our desire to remember and pray for our
departed family and friends has a legitimate place in our spirituality and
worship. Not because they need us to
cajole God to let them through the pearly gates, but because we love them and
therefore we pray for them. And they,
being with God, pray for us.
And
so we celebrate All Souls’ Day today, now as an extension, as it were, of All
Saints’ Day, so we can focus in our prayers and remembrance upon our own
saints, our parish, our friends, and our families.
