Hallowtide

My grandmother was born on Halloween and died on Christmas--bookends of life and death--in between she lived 72 years on this earth. The veil is thin between the two worlds. Sometimes I can feel her Spirit.

Hallowtide, the celebration of three "other worldly" days begins

October 31 on Halloween Eve.

If you grew up "trick or treating" wearing a costume like I did, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a stand-alone night to get as much candy as you can, go home and eat the best ones (M&M's for me) before putting away the mask. This scenario will play out across neighborhoods as it has for ages this Saturday night, followed by a one-hour time change adding to the weirdness. Come Sunday the saints come marching in!

November 1 is All Hallows Day or All Saints Day--honoring all the known and unknown saints in heaven. I paid little attention to that phrase whenever I heard it as a child in church. That changed for me at my dearly beloved uncle's funeral a few years ago when the priest said: "Raymond has now joined the Communion of Saints". I imagined him seeing his mother again and my mother and my father who has been gone for sixty years. All of them are somewhere on the other side of the thin veil, but I believe they are never too far away.

November 2 is All Soul's Day, or the Day of the Dead-- a day of remembrance for all who have passed from this earth into the great unknown. A gravestone is a tangible reminder of a person who once lived on this side of the thin veil with the rest of us. Where have they gone? That is as much a mystery as the time and place of our own deaths.

Memento Mori* is a Latin term meaning "remember you will die". As final as that statement is, its deeper meaning is one of reflection on how we are living--what matters most--what we are doing with our lives. This ancient wisdom dates back to Socrates time. Many have had their say since, and church can be heavy-handed on the subject of mortality. But, who's to say what follows this life?

The first time I stayed at "All Hallows Guesthouse" at the Julian Center in Norwich, England, I spent a good deal of time alone in the neighboring Anchorage where Lady Julian lived and died. There came a moment late one afternoon when I felt my own mortality with a capital "M"! I will never forget the sense of foreboding that crept in.

Clearly, I did not die but it gave me pause to think about my own death. What would have mattered most about my life?

Whether living in an Anchorage like Julian to be close to her beloved God, or living in a world where I was free to cross time and space to sit in that

very place seven centuries later, I came to see that mortality is not an ending but a continuum where we all meet in the Communion of Saints.

https://dailystoic.com/what-is-memento-mori/