Getting to church early on All Souls’ Day is a tradition of mine. I hope for a few moments in solitude and quiet to focus on the book. Not the liturgy of the day, but the Book of Dead, the ledger that will be out near the altar all month, a congregational prayer list open for all of us to enter names of deceased relatives and friends for whom we pray especially this month.
If I’m not mistaken, originally the Book of the Dead, and the Nov. 2 holy day itself, were intended to remember people who died in the past year. But we’re not so limited at our parish, oh no. Large and small families list generations of departed ancestors. There are lots of pages in the ledger.
And I’m not scoffing, because I do the same thing. I expect my Irish tear ducts to work when I list friends gone away this year, still grieving for a newspaper colleague whose good humor made office tensions tolerable, a childhood friend whose alcoholism made his family begin their mourning during his lifetime and my dear friend from Ireland who, I like to imagine, will get a kick out of having her name in the book at St. Patrick Church in Hawaii.
But then, in the spirit of the congregation, I will get on a roll and inscribe a substantial portion of the family tree. Doing that is a way of remembering our personal Christian history, generations of people of the same faith. With exceptions: there’s Uncle Ernie, a skeptic who tolerated his wife’s faith, but also questioned her beliefs. It makes me gleeful to enter his name each year, and wonder if it makes his ears ring, figuratively speaking.
It’s a quirky thing for me to be doing this. Taking flowers to gravesides has never seemed important to me, perhaps because I’ve lived so long so far from the cemeteries where family is buried. When I see local friends gather at a grave to remember holidays and birthdays, it seems to be an affirmation of the living survivors. Dates do ring my bell, and I do head out to midday Mass on June 29 and Dec. 8, and other memorable birth dates, not death dates.
Beyond quirky
For many Christians of other persuasions, praying for the dead is considered beyond quirky. It’s one of the papist practices that Martin Luther deleted in the “Reformation” he began. A root of our belief is in the second book of Maccabees: Judas Maccabee “made atonement for the dead, that they might be freed from sin.”
That is a text that Jewish scholars did not include in their scriptures and one of seven books in the Catholic Bible that Protestants rejected.
But that’s a subject for another time. And so is the topic of Purgatory. So let’s not speculate about where we might find the people we’re praying for all these many years later.
Since All Souls’ Day fell on Sunday this year, it was not a solitude kind of scene, what with the choir warming up and the communing going on among the living in the pews. When I did get time to add my own little litany to the Book of the Dead, I couldn’t help but revel in the quiet and contrast it to the carnival spectacle that All Hallow’s Eve has become.
This year I bring to the Book of the Dead, some family names offered by my octogenarian friend Mary, confined in a nursing home. She wishes, prays, that her name will soon be on the list.
Our weekly visits lately have been centered on her plans for her funeral. She’s had the planning conversation with a priest, and her brother sent several potential selections for the readings at Mass. We have perused the “Gather” songbook for favorite appropriate songs. She tells me Father’s cool with including “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” at the end of the funeral Mass. There’s a columbarium niche waiting in her old hometown.
These conversations after I bring Holy Communion to her are so totally upbeat and matter-of-fact. She is mentally with it and witty. We chat after she’s cleaned her plate at lunchtime and before she is tucked in for an afternoon nap. She shares photos of grandchildren and plans to watch “Dancing With the Stars.” She is not wasting away or in pain, not morbidly fixated on death.
The whole ongoing conversation about her approaching transition from time into eternity is a testament to her stalwart faith. I wish the younger generations of her family would tune in. But I can’t blame them for lacking the courage to listen. Death is inevitable, but it’s not easy for most people to confront.
The proposed funeral texts from her brother have become comforting daily reading for my friend. She’s not waiting for the event, she’s reading the script in advance.
That makes me grin and weep each week.
The ever popular 23rd Psalm is on her current reading list and was predictably the responsorial psalm at the All Souls’ Day Mass.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In verdant pastures he gives me repose … Only goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.”
An alternative choice offered by her brother is from Psalm 27: “One thing I ask of the Lord: this I seek: to dwell in the Lord’s house all the days of my life … For God will hide me in his shelter in time of trouble. He will conceal me in the cover of his tent, and set me high upon a rock.” That’s the one that would be my choice but, well, it’s not my funeral.
Those psalms are in my pocket for the month as I hold close in my thoughts and prayers many, many people wherever they are on the timeline from history to eternity.
