Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
All Saints C - November 1, 2022
 |
| Br. Josép's altar for the Dia de Los Muertos. |
This longing to celebrate these three days in a tangible way has a bit of a history for me that goes back to my formation as a monk. When I was a novice, I became good friends with Sister Martha, who was then in the novitiate of the Cabrini Sisters down the road from us. She would come to visit from time to time and we would sit down and have long conversations about our vocation and what had brought us to religious life. One day, I asked Sister Martha what she longed for in her vocation. Without hesitating and very confidently, she said: “¡Yo quiero ser santa!” I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable by her response, as if perhaps she was wanting to be “holier than thou” or something. She told me stories of the people in her life whose own lives had influenced her in her decision to become a religious. She referred to these people as “santos”.
Also during my novitiate, we were given an article to read written by Cynthia Borgeault. She writes about how the Fall offers us a Triduum in All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Day. Now, we know about the Triduum, which means “three days”, that forms the heart of the Holy Week celebration- Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the great Vigil of Easter. The external observances of these days help us to experience a solemn journey deep within our own hearts.
Both Spring and Fall Triduums deal, in different ways, with the Paschal Mystery, that passage from death to life which is at the heart of all mystical paths. They do so, however, with a different emotional and spiritual character and experience. In the Spring the days are lengthening, resurrection energy is moving through the earth as it bursts with new life. In the Fall the movement is inward. The days are shortening, the leaves are dying and falling, and the earth draws into itself. The fall season confronts us with reminders of our own mortality.
Like the Spring Triduum, the Fall Triduum offers us a journey. It begins with All Hallows Eve. If we look beyond the shallow revelry and excess of the popular holiday Halloween, we can see it as the symbol of facing our shadow self and the tricks our ego will play, if we let it, when it doesn’t get what it wants. Having faced and confronted the shadow self, we then move to today’s feast of All Saints, the glorious celebration of what we call the Communion of Saints. Communion not only because Holy Communion is usually what we are doing when we remember them, but also because we believe that’s what they’re doing- communing- dissolving in gratitude at that great banquet, where there is no more tears, no more weeping, no more pain, but only rejoicing in the heart of God for eternity.
And the table around which we are about to gather is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet around which the saints are already gathered. It is the table around which we are tied to the whole Communion of Saints, united with all who have ever received bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. We are joined with angels and archangels, with cherubim and seraphim. We are joined with the church on earth and the church in heaven and all who have called on the name of God. The whole host of heaven crowds the very air we breathe, and all becomes the Kairos of intimacy.
All Saints Day is also one of the days set aside by the Church as especially appropriate for new Baptisms. In other words, a day when new saints, as the church has long referred to them, are made. They are God’s anointed, the exact same words the Gospels use for Jesus, joined with him in baptism they too became God’s children. Anointed by water and the spirit, these world’s newest christs are called to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. They are called to see the face of God in every stranger’s face, loving neighbor as self. They are called to commit to be the walking, talking good news of God in the flesh by following in the teaching and the prayers and the practice and the fellowship of all those christs who have gone before us. I know it may seem as if I’m being provocative by calling them christs, but Meister Eckart once said that he heard Christ whispering in his ear: “I became human for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.” We baptized Christians are anointed. This is what Sister Martha was getting at when she spoke about the saints in her life.
So today we remember the saints known and unknown, even as we add to their numbers. Tomorrow we will acknowledge grieve, and celebrate the loved ones we have lost, “from the viewpoint of this world” as Cynthia Bourgeault puts it. I much rather call it Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) than All Souls Day because it reminds me of the finality of death that challenges me to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. And I don’t mean eternal life as the perpetuation of time, on and on, which quite frankly seems to me an awful idea, but the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away.
Dia de los Muertos rather then All Souls Day seems to me also more in line with the Christian belief of the resurrection of the body, the experience that soul and body are existentially one in the human person. But the body we call our own in this sense is not limited to our skins. As Brother David Steidl-Rast describes it: “It comprises all those elements of the cosmos by which we have expressed our own personal uniqueness; it is the total person. And the resurrection of life, as St. Paul sees it, is a new creation of the total person, soul and body, by God who alone provides the continuity between the old and the new life.”
On my Altar del Día de los Muertos are some of those saints who gave and lost themselves to the Christ-self within them, to universal interrelatedness in love. They practiced what Ghandi called the “Evangelism of the Rose”. They were so beautifully who God made them to be, their fragrance led others to want to hang around them. They were the saints in my life who embodied the faith so clearly, I not only wanted it for myself, but also wanted to create my own job description for those who come after me. A hundred years from now, God willing, someone will remember us for handing on what was handed to us. May we all engage the rite of passage of these three holy days and till the inner soil of our hearts for the mystery of the Incarnation that lies ahead.
¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
Amen+
No comments:
Post a Comment