In my last post, I spoke briefly about All-Saints Day by way of claiming Hallowe’en as a legitimate Christian celebration. As a celebration of all the saints who lack a feast of their own, All-Saints was declared an official holy day of the church by Pope Gregory IV in 837. The feast was later moved to November 1 in response to the European (specifically Celtic) holiday of Samhain on October 31, which thus became for Christians All-Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en.
All Saints Day was John Wesley’s favorite Christian celebration. Joe Iovino writes:
John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, enjoyed and celebrated All Saints Day. In a journal entry from November 1, 1767, Wesley calls it “a festival I truly love.” On the same day in 1788, he writes, “I always find this a comfortable day.” The following year he calls it “a day that I peculiarly love.”
Like Wesley, I have long loved All-Saints Day, regarding it as a fitting celebration and memorial of all the faithful dead. This is my favorite All-Saint’s Day hymn, composed by William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, and usually sung, with a crashing opening chord, to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ stirring tune!
I must confess, though, that I long thought that All Souls Day was just another name for All-Saints, and that Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) was likewise the same day, in Spanish. I have learned, though, that these are actually three different, although related, festivals.
All Souls Day is a separate, specifically Roman Catholic celebration on November 2. Odilo, abbot of Cluny (who died in 1048) thought it fitting that, having honored all the saints in heaven on All-Saints Day, we spend the following day remembering all the other faithful dead, praying for their release from purgatory. This picture from Encyclopedia Britannica (© kristo74/Fotolia) shows candlelit graves in a Catholic cemetery–the candles left as a sign of the prayers going up for each departed soul.
As a rule, Protestants aren’t much on purgatory–after all, didn’t Jesus tell the bandit crucified with him, “I assure you that today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43)? But the Christian hope has not been, traditionally, that our disembodied souls will be absorbed into the changeless, timeless eternity of the Godhead. In Scripture and in the tradition, the hope for a life beyond this life has been joined to our personality continuing, in an embodied existence: everlasting, then, rather than timelessly eternal.
The earliest explicit statement about a life beyond death in the Bible is Daniel 12:2, a text that in its final form dates to the second century BCE: “Many of those who sleep in the dusty land will wake up—some to eternal life, others to shame and eternal disgrace.” Notice that this passage is not about the assured immortality of the soul, but rather about the hoped-for future resurrection of the body. Indeed, the resurrection of the body at the end of the age is the teaching of the rabbis in the Mishnah, and is assumed throughout the Christian New Testament (for example, Luke 14:14; John 5:29; 11:24; 1 Corinthians 15:20-28). The creeds of Christianity, too, confess the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul.
Most importantly, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection everywhere emphasize the empty tomb (Matthew 28:11-15; Mark 16:6) and the physical, tangible nature of the risen Jesus, who displays in his body the wounds of crucifixion, invites his friends to touch him, and even shares a meal with them (for example, Luke 24:36-43; John 20:26-29). The risen Jesus is not Jesus’ ghost, but Jesus himself: the same Jesus who was crucified.
So–what does all this mean? What do I believe happens when we die? When I was a young Christian, I could have told you, with all the confidence of youthful arrogance. But now, I am an old Christian, and no longer quite so glib or blithe. I believe in the resurrection of the dead, friends. And that means, first of all, that I believe that the dead really do die. One day soon (although I hope, not too soon), I too will really die. But I am also certain that the last word belongs to the Lord of life. The God who raised Jesus can, and will, raise us up at the end of the age, in the world to come.
Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann put it this way: “The immortality of the soul is an opinion – the resurrection of the dead is a hope.” Christian hope is not Pollyanna optimism–a saccharine denial of the hard realities of life, and of death. It is rather the confidence that we may place ourselves, our world, our future, and even our mourned and beloved dead into the hands of God, trusting that the power at the heart of all things is indeed just and loving and kind, and that nothing beautiful will be lost.
Anglican priest, physicist, and theologian John Polkinghorne described the soul as “what expresses and carries the continuity of living personhood,” not only beyond this life, but within it, from the past to the present and into the future (The God of Hope and the End of the World [New Haven: Yale University, 2002], 105). Drawing on information theory, he proposed that “the carrier of continuity is the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ in which that matter is organized” (Polkinghorne 2002 105–6). That pattern, preserved as a “disembodied existence” in the mind of God after death, will ensure continuity of the self into the world to come, when God reembodies us in the new creation (Polkinghorne 2002, 107).
What will that waiting-time be like, I wonder? Will I sleep, as Luther believed? Will there be, as Catholic dogma holds, the opportunity to strive further toward perfection–something like purgatory? And what will happen once we are resurrected? Frankly, I do not know. But like Paul, I believe that nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38), and so when I leave this life, I will be with him (Philippians 1:23). Whatever else Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross may mean, they surely mean that we may trust him not to let us go.
Which bring us to Dia de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead. In its origins, this festival is neither European nor Middle Eastern but, as the Disney film Coco jubilantly recognizes, Mexican. While it shows some influence from Celtic Spain (Samhain is called Samaín in Galicia), and from the Christian All Saints and All Souls Days, the pre-Christian roots of Dia de los Muertos go back to indigenous Meso-American cultures such as the Aztecs. Significantly, while (much like Samhain) Dia de los Muertos involves belief in the dead crossing over to the world of the living, those dead are not feared: their families remember, celebrate, and welcome them.
According to tradition, the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31 and the spirits of children can rejoin their families for 24 hours. The spirits of adults can do the same on November 2.
Latin Christians, not just south of the border but everywhere, rightly find in these days a celebration of new life in Christ defeating death.
Happy Hallowe’en, friends! A joyous All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Dia de los Muertos to you all.