Saturday, October 30, 2021

Days of the Dead Proper 25B

 All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, means “Saints’ Evening,” the night before All Saints’ Day. Halloween begins three days during which the Church reflects on the lives of those who have gone before us – those who made significant contributions to the Body of Christ, Christ’s Church. It is thought that some of the tricks, treats, costumes and customs with which we are familiar evolved from Celtic harvest festivals.

 

All Hallows, All Saints and All Souls, like the fall season itself, is a time to reflect on the cycles of life and death. And for those who follow in the way of Christ, it is a time to remember that this fleshy, time-bound existence is itself bounded by a greater reality of hope beyond mortality represented and embodied in these saints and souls, a vast company and communion dwelling beyond time and forever.

 

Fr. Sam Portaro, in his reflections on the Saints of the Church, Brightest and Best, observes that laughter is a component of Halloween, “the crazy laughter that comes of surprise and of fear. We would rather not talk about the fear, yet it is the fear we commemorate these latter days of October, when the chill of winter wafts in and around the dying warmth of summer, when the trees and all of nature echo the theme of death. All the little hobgoblins in sheets, emulating the spirit world of ghosts and skeletons, as vampire and all manner of horrid creatures, move us to laughter, for laughter is our way of averting fear.” [Portaro p. 198]

 

Yet, laughter has been in short supply the past two years of a world-wide pandemic amidst an already divided and dangerous world of wars, economic inequalities, and all manner of mortal afflictions, of which we are even more cognizant as the evening news walks us through over-crowded hospital wards of our peers and contemporaries tied to ventilators and therapies hoping to survive; as doctors and nurses experience the very same PTSD symptoms from critical patient overload as many of our fighting men and women experience throughout the world.

 

On Halloween we attempt snicker at death and dress up to disguise ourselves as if we might possibly fool the grim reaper. But we are those people who need not run from our fears. We follow Jesus. The same Jesus who is depicted walking straight ahead to a truly fearful end in Jerusalem. In chapter twelve of Mark, his adversaries are doing anything and everything to trick him with trick questions about paying taxes to Caesar, marriage in the after-life and all manner of ridiculous things to humiliate him and discourage his followers. [Mark 12:28-34] Yet, Jesus keeps feeding hungry crowds, healing all manner of persons from all stations of life of physical, mental and spiritual dis-ease. Jesus is already living in the very kingdom and reign of God that he announces wherever he goes, calling anyone listening and watching to follow him in his fearless journey to Jerusalem.

 

A scribe, one of several groups of people trying to stop him, asks him a question: Which commandment is the first of all? Jesus responds with the Shema Y’Israel: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’[Deuteronomy 6:4-9] To which he adds a second: “And in your spare time after loving God with your whole self, the God who loves you and forgives you no matter what, you will also love your neighbor as yourself, as stated long long ago in Leviticus 19:18.”

Unlike his fellow Scribes, Pharisees and Herodians, this scribe replied, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” That is, more important than the power brokers who maintain the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem that along with Rome has monopolized the wealth and economy of all Israel. The Scribe agrees with the warnings of prophets throughout the centuries before Jesus who decried this monopoly and concentration of wealth among the very few in Jerusalem at the social expense of the rest of those who sowed and reaped the fields that fed them; those who fished and raised livestock that fed them; the craftsmen and artisans who clothed them and furnished the homes of the Empire and the Jerusalem aristocracy. This Jesus is the real thing, thinks the scribe. It’s not the rituals but what we do for others that demonstrates that we walk in the Way of the Lord.

 

The text concludes: After that no one dared to ask him any question.

 

To walk in the way of Jesus’s twin commandments of love is to walk in the Way of the Lord. It is just one way in which we seek the Lord with all our hearts. And it is one way that we live in communion with the saints and souls who in their days of decision also walked in the light of Jesus’s twin commandments of love while facing any and all fears.

 

May these days of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls reminds us of who we are and whose we are. As we reflect on the lives of All Saints and All Souls, may we acknowledge, as Sam Portaro urges us, just how hard it was for them, and is for us, to look death in the face and say, “I know you and I shall see you again.” But it is harder still to scan the flickering light of life’s vitality in the face of a dying friend or relative and say, “I know I shall see you again.” [Ibid p.201]

 

May All the Communion of Saints and Souls inspire us to be those people who sustain the virtue of Hope in a world that often presents scant evidence that such Hope is justified. May we dare to hope beyond the constraints of mortality that day by day we might take one step at a time into the Reign of God Jesus calls us to follow. Amen.

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