Saints & ancestors on All Hallow's Eve
PLUS my mother-artist presentation video & paid subscriber bonus video
I have neighbours on one side of my fence who go to great expense to honor their family members who have died. Funerals are expensive. Huge. There are rituals for slaughtering animals and feasting. There are rules about how to mourn, and when to end the mourning. There are ceremonies for unveiling tombstones. The spiritual realm is real, there’s just a thin curtain between one world and the next. In this world, you are not an island, you’re not alone. You are part of a continuous chain of beings. There is honor, and pride that comes from this. Also, there is a fear that comes from this. The spirits of the ancestors interfere with the living, rituals become burdensome, evil spirits can stalk the night. Someone can curse you, demons can possess you.
On the other side of the fence, we don’t talk about the dead. We are individuals, autonomous beings, free from tradition, free to make our own life choices. The line between the living and the dead is not a thin curtain but a chasm of scientific words spoken in hospitals by doctors. We are separate. We do not fear evil spirits at night. But we’re also lonely. And when death comes, we don’t know what to do with it.
I just finished reading “A Hole in the World: Finding Hope in Rituals of Grief and Healing” by Amanda Held Opelt.
She talks about her experience of unexpectedly losing her sister (Rachel Held Evans) to the flu right before the COVID pandemic. This loss, the loss of her grandmother, and the loss of several unborn babies, all forced her to walk the lonely hallways of grief. She felt so unmoored and alone. There was no real cultural script to allow her (or people around her) to meaningfully engage with death, with her loss.
In the book she delves into historical Western cultural rituals for grieving which are now lost in our society : wearing black, keening, holding a wake, tolling bells, covering mirrors… each of these rituals was originally rooted in some spiritual belief (cover the mirrors so the spirits don’t snatch you away) — but often continued because of their other effects … don’t worry about your appearance, or too much self-reflection, when you’re in the beginning of deep loss. Christianity adapted some existing rituals, and in other cases erased them (the Irish tradition of keening, or loud funeral wailing, was seen as too excessive by some church leaders, who felt that stoicism was a better response to death given our hope of resurrection. So interesting to see one set of cultural values squash another set while dressed up in the guise of Christianity. I’m not sure stoicism is any more biblical than keening.). Amanda pulls from various Jewish traditions as well as early Christian practices, and gives biblical examples of these types of embodied ways of grieving throughout the book.
It was an interesting book to read so close to All Hallow’s Eve and All Saint’s Day. It was this time last year that my grandmother passed away. I have been noticing things that she loved. I can hear her Southern voice exclaiming over the azaleas blooming everywhere. She had a beloved pot of knockout roses outside her garage door that everyone who entered was encouraged to compliment.
I am not a gardener, but I’m finding myself wondering what it would take to keep a pot of them alive. I want to continue that story.
This is the first All Hallow’s Eve where I’ve really thought about saints in my own family who have gone before. In evangelical protestant circles, we don’t really talk about saints (besides Jim Elliot, of course. Maybe Amy Carmichael). We don’t talk about spiritual ancestors. We’re individuals. It’s us and the Bible, and our own personal salvation. Don’t confuse it with culture (the heathen American one, or the African one, for that matter).
That is a caricature, of course. We have other ways of marking history - personal testimonies, for example. But there is a real loss when a whole group loses a ritual. The cultural script is a kind of guard rail, a trail for you to walk down when you’re overwhelmed and and don’t know the next step to take, a familiar path for other people to walk with you. The common rituals of grief make an accepted space for other people to talk about your loss, they make space for times of sadness and times of joy while remembering, they force your body through the motions until your soul can catch up. A liturgy.
Perhaps, this Hallowe’en, we could use it as an excuse to ask one another about our losses. Whose memories are we carrying this season? What particular sadnesses? What joys? Christian time-keeping sees the present in light of eternity. One day we’ll feast and worship with this great cloud of witnesses that has been cheering us on.
So, share with me in the comments — who is someone in that cloud you are thinking about?
Free Video: The “Third Shift”: Lessons in Creativity from Mother Artists
In this recording of the 20-minute talk I gave at Mini Moot, I’ll share some of what I have learned in the narratives of mother-artists - both contemporary, and in history! This talk is for you if:
You’re a mother who is feeling the tension between creative output and motherhood.
You’re a father and have a creative spouse.
You are wondering how to encourage and support the mother-artists in your life
Mother-artists mentioned: Madeline L’Engle, Rachel Cusk, Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tillie Olsen, Denise Gesser,
Presentation slides (with the graphs that I mention in the talk!)
The Homeliest of Houses
(Illustration by Inga Moore)
I also got to share a little talk on examples of “homeliness” in children’s literature, and how this relates to Christian hospitality. Here is my recording of this 20 minute session (that I made when I was practicing it, emphasis on practicing!), full of quotes from Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, The Lord of the Rings (yeah, Tom Bombadil) and Tales of the Kingdom. This video, along with this month’s “Just Beautiful links” are for paid subscribers, as a way to say THANK YOU for supporting my writing work. Paid subscribers help me say “no” to other paid work, and “yes” to putting together this newsletter and working on my annotated edition of Little Women for teen and tween readers.
Just Beautiful Links are also included below!
Until next time!
-Steph
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