Showing posts with label Samhain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samhain. Show all posts

Update All Saints and All Souls 2013

This coming week we celebrate two major Christian feasts..
All Saints on Friday November 1st and All Souls on November 2nd. 


Scripture readings for All Saints Day Mass are here.



Scripture readings for All Souls Day Mass are here

Beautiful monochrome illustration of the Saints




The ancient Celts called the end of October and the beginning of November, Samhain.
The Gaelic calendar recognised the natural seasons of the earth with four main festivals, Imbolc (spring), Beltane (Summer), Lughnasadh (Harvest season also known as Lammas), and Samhain (the onset of winter). 

Samhain marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark nights and cold winters, a time of year that was often associated with human death. 

 By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honour the dead.  All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. 

The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.


To hallow is "to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate". The adjective form hallowed, as used in The Lord's Prayer, means holy, consecrated, sacred, or revered.

If you have Celtic sensibilities especially at this time of year there is a heightened recognition of this time being a "thin place" between this world and the next.
 
  So it's a special time when we can pray for and with each other in the Communion of Saints and All Souls.

Click here for A Meditation on Death and Life by William A. Barry S.J. from America Magazine.

Click here for a reflection from the blog "Interrupting The Silence."- about the Transfiguration but it is also a pretty accurate description of what a thin place means 

Click here for  a lovely reflection for the feast of All Saints and All Souls by John Davies, which finishes with this Jewish prayer below...

 "This day in sacred convocation we remember those who gave us life. 
We remember those who enriched our lives with love and beauty, 
kindness and compassion, 
thoughtfulness and understanding. 
We renew our bonds to those who have gone the way of all earth. 
As we reflect upon those whose memory moves us this day, 
we seek consolation,
 and the strength and the insight born of faith. 
Tender as a parent with a child, the Lord is merciful. 
God knows how we are fashioned, remembers that we are dust. 
 Our days are as grass; we flourish as a flower in a field.
 The wind passes over it and is gone,
 and no one can recognize where it grew.
 But the Lord's compassion for us, 
the Lord's righteousness to children's children, 
remain, age after age, 
unchanging. 



Here's a few quotes from the late John O'Donohue from his book Anam Cara: A Book Of Celtic Wisdom

“The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together” 

 “The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused.” 
  
 All Souls Day is a reminder not only of the inevitability of death, but also of our connection with eternity.  

 "Death carries us home where “… all that we seek – goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love – are no longer distant for us…” 

 It is human and natural to grieve for those who we have lost and the pain of loss is often not that far from the surface. Many people find this time of year very difficult, because we do feel sad and miss those whom we have loved. Maybe some comfort can be gained from these words.
 
“We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home.”


  FROM THE ARCHIVES

  • Combined post on All Saints and All Souls Day 2011 here
  • Combined Post on All Saints and All Souls Day 2012 here 
  • All Saints Day 2010 post here
  • All Saints Day 2011 post here 

Image source
Click here for my post from 2012 on Trusting In The Providence of God which also relates to this time of year when many feel the acute pangs of grief.

Here's the poem by John O'Donohue on Grief from the post above.

For Grief
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.


Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.


There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.


Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time. 
- John O’Donohue
To Bless the Space Between Us
Time for some music..
Like the song by Carrie Newcomer says, 
it's a time for a gathering of spirits.
Beautiful....

Click here for link to lyrics.



Back to John O'Donohue

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.” 

 From "To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings."


Other Related Articles On The History And Customs Of This Time.
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All Saints and Souls

In front of haunted house during Halloween sea...Image via Wikipedia
Looking ahead to next week sees a strange trilogy of holidays — Halloween (Celtic Samhain) on Monday; All Saints on Tuesday Nov. 1 followed by All Souls — 

The church has been celebrating All Saints Day since the 3rd century;









It’s an opportunity to commemorate all the saints, known and unknown and even potential ones in the making maybe, and then there's heaven, hell, the beatific vision ( whatever happened to that ?); and then there's purgatory to reflect on  - don't here much about purgatory these days.  

But the church practice of praying for indulgences to get time off in purgatory has been revived under Pope Benedict XVI.
From this article 








 From a New York Times article
"Indulgences were one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality. 

Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who rejected the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.
For folks in my generation, the indulgence is primarily known as the means through which the existence of the entire universe is threatened in the movie Dogma, so I’m not sure I welcome its revival.
Still, given Pope Benedict XVI’s overall conservatism, I suspect that this is just the first of many old traditions that Catholics can expect to see revived. 
Other traditions I expect to pop back up include the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and the Spanish Inquisition. Just kidding on that last part, of course. 

Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition."

"For centuries the payment of money brought deliverance from purgatory.
That practice eventually troubled  Martin Luther's conscience and sparked the Reformation. 
This is from a sales pitch of the Dominican Friar Tetzel, commissioned by Pope Leo X to reap a fortune for Rome: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs"!"

Indulgences were a system of extortion by which people would give their money to the church -  in exchange for a lighter punishment for their sins.

The church has "made merchandise of...souls of men" . Popes published lists of every crime from incest to piracy to murder with a price for each sin - which the Church would give absolution for each (according to the monetary payment)."

Read this article on why indulgences are making a comeback in the Catholic church supposedly with a more modern emphasis.. we need to go to confession more but there are no payments involved...

 and a very erudite article on it all here - Warning ! it involves heavy words like expiation.


I think limbo got the boot somewhere along the way..

- I remember the whole idea of limbo used to bother many Catholics when I was growing up and involved some mightily cruel idea that unbaptised babies ended up there. 






Hence why there was a manic practice of getting a baby baptised as soon as possible- in some sense it's nice to think of baptism as a sacrament that is the first formal welcome from the church  to a baby into the hands of a loving God and the community,  but like so many rules and regulations it became to be seen by many as just another perverted form of spiritual blackmail - things have thankfully changed for the better.




Purgatory seemed to be a milder form of spiritual abuse, inveighed with more scales of being weighed and found wanting, although we were re-assured that the sins involved in putting a person in purgatory were already forgiven but it still was pay back time; so it was a place for some hope , a gentler embellishment of hell in a waiting room of sorts with a heavenly carrot on the end - an extra chance to get to heaven - really weird.




The night of Halloween (Celtic Samhain - pronounced sow -wen), also called All Hallows Eve, is traditionally the eve of the celebration of all the hallowed saints. 


In Celtic Culture it celebrated the end of a year, and represented the final harvest for farmers. and was also associated with death. It is believed that on the night of October 31 the ghosts of the dead were able to mingle with the living, because at Samhain the souls of those who had died during the year travelled to the Otherworld.






People gathered to sacrifice animals, fruits and vegetables at this time. They also lit bonfires in honour of the dead, to aid in their journey, and to keep them away from life.




The Celtic Spirituality writer, Fr. John J. O" Riordain, writes of All Saints/All Souls in his book Irish Catholic Spirituality, Celtic and Roman:


Irish hospitality extended no less to the dead than to the living.  It is still with us and has always been characteristic of our religious expression.  There was a widespread belief, for instance, that the dead members of the family visited their old home at the beginning of November, the ancient pagan Irish feast of Samhain .
  Leaving the door unlocked, having a good fire in the hearth, and the placing of a bowl of water on the table was a common mode of preparing the house for a visit from the dead at Samhain.  So too was the custom of lighting a candle for each deceased family member--a ritual performed during evening prayer in the home.

  Kevin Danaher, the folklorist, once asked an old man if he was in dread of entering a haunted house.  'In dread of it?' replied the old man.  'What would I be in dread of, and the souls of my own dead as thick as bees around me?'  
................


  Whether people are 'alive' or 'dead' makes little difference on this night, for The Celts are fond of a tradition that draw no hard and fast lines between life in gleann na ndeor, the vale of tears, or Tir na nog, the Land of Eternal Youth-- heaven. 
Dublin:  The Columba Press, 1998.



The custom of trick or treat explained here






As for All Souls Day, it seems that celebrating all the saints that have passed before us made people to want to also remember all the slightly-less-than-saintly friends and family who have died and it also stemmed from pagan celebrations of putting out food and such for the dead to join you in a meal. On All Souls Day there are requiem masses to remember the faithful departed.

In Mexico All Saints and All Souls are combined in a two day spectacular national holiday celebration known asThe Day of The Dead .( El Dia de Los Muertos).


This was part of the culture long before the arrival of the Conquistadors, but was incorporated by the colonizing Spaniards into the Catholic holy days of All Souls and All Saints.
It is a salutary reminder to us that in the midst of life we are in death, that death is the great equalizer; pawns, kings and queens and their castles, the  knights and bishops (!) all end up in the same box at the end of this game of life.





La Catrina – In Mexican folk culture, the Catr...Image via Wikipedia


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