{"id":384,"date":"2010-11-04T15:21:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T19:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stlydias.org\/blog\/?p=384"},"modified":"2015-02-17T18:04:47","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T23:04:47","slug":"all-saints-and-these-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/all-saints-and-these-souls\/","title":{"rendered":"All Saints and These Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Sierra is a MFA student and lives in New York. \u00a0A congregant at St. Lydia’s, he blogs here under the category Jeremiah Speaking.<\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/div>\n

A guy, white with dreadlocks and funky shoes, came to the church where I work. \u00a0\u201cPeace be upon you,\u201d he said
\n\u201cUm, hi,\u201d I responded.
\n\u201cWhey do you have Jack-O-Lanterns in front of the church,\u201d he asked, \u201ca symbol of a pagan holiday?\u201d
\n\u201cBecause the choir kids carved them.\u201d
\n\u201cDo you celebrate Halloween?\u201d
\n\u201cWell, a lot of people who go to church here do. \u00a0We celebrate All Saints, and All Souls days, when we pray for people who have died.\u201d<\/p>\n

After he left I thought a little about Halloween. \u00a0I enjoy carving pumpkins as much as the next guy, and eating the seeds toasted in the oven with salt even better, but I\u2019ve never really really liked Halloween. There\u2019s the whole \u201clets dress up so that other people can judge us\u201d thing, and I\u2019m really self-conscious enough to begin with. \u00a0I can possibly trace this back to me at five years old in my robot costume, made of boxes and tin foil and plastic tubing, sitting on the hayride and unable to see out of the holes we had cut for eyes, crying inside my little cardboard prison because I cried a lot then, until we take it off and I spend the rest of Halloween unhappily in my grey sweatpants and hoodie. \u00a0So every year as October 31st approaches and people start talking (and talking and talking) about their costumes I\u2019m thinking about how I\u2019d rather be thinking about something else (like, my homework, or more likely what I am going to have for dinner).<\/p>\n

The next day, someone came into my office crying. \u00a0She told me about the baby, not her baby but a friend\u2019s, who had been born four months early and spent the last six weeks in the clean white of the hospital. \u00a0He died on Tuesday. \u00a0I was at a loss for what to what to say or do, feeling sad myself because I know this family, too, and afraid as I often am of not saying the right thing. \u00a0Fortunately a priest was there who knew what to do and say, and also knew that there isn\u2019t much that can be done or said about this, about death.<\/p>\n

On Sunday they will celebrate All Saints Day at the church. \u00a0During the service they will commemorate the faithful departed, reading out the names of those who have died. \u00a0I added this baby\u2019s name, Miles, to the list, feeling someone else\u2019s tragedy in the letters of his name. \u00a0\u00a0The world is a difficult place and the answers are usually hidden form us, and in the end what else can we do but name our grief, say the names of the dead, say them to ourselves and to each other and to God. \u00a0\u00a0Each name is full of hope and an angry question, and we are like the psalmists demanding that God do something about how messed up everything is. \u00a0Each name is a remembrance of the lost and the love we had for them.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back, sort of, to Halloween, and these strange rituals: carving faces in orange gourds, dressing up as the saints and the dead, populating the sidewalks with apparitions, other possible selves, the imaginary and the unpleasantly real. \u00a0We are teasing, or maybe we are even celebrating, the things that cause us to crumple up with grief or terror, our smallness and our fear sand our death. Rather than pretending that the world is an easy place, we bring the worst of it front and center, sharing our sadness and our fears with each other. \u00a0When we bring all that out in the open it loses some of its power. \u00a0Death does not own us, we remind each other, even though it sometimes kicks us hard in the stomach.<\/p>\n

So on Sunday I went ahead and taped some tea bags to my shirt (I now owe a certain someone about 10 cups of tea), a few ribbons, and there you go, I\u2019m The Tea Party. \u00a0I went to St. Lydia\u2019s where other people were dressed in costumes, some of them utterly charming, some not so much. \u00a0We shared a meal, and I was reminded that even that isn\u2019t an easy thing to do sometimes. \u00a0Then we sang and held hands and said our prayers aloud, to ourselves and each other and to God, wearing our costumes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Sierra is a MFA student and lives in New York. \u00a0A congregant at St. Lydia’s, he blogs here under the category Jeremiah Speaking. A guy, white with dreadlocks and funky shoes, came to the church where I work. \u00a0\u201cPeace be upon you,\u201d he said \u201cUm, hi,\u201d I responded. \u201cWhey do you have Jack-O-Lanterns in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2962,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/2962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}