The Nymphicus Contemplative Project

Halloween is past,  with all its vampires, witches, werewolves, and classic movies starring Vincent Price or Christopher Lee. (It was 80F here, albeit with low humidity.) Yesterday shone with the brightness of the saints in light: "O how glorious is the kingdom in which the saints rejoice with Christ!" (from the antiphon to the Magnificat at second Vespers of All Saints Day)

Today is All Souls Day, sometimes called the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, and now, with all the saints and all the souls mentioned, now is when my spooky season begins.

Nowadays the "saints" of All Saints Day are understood as those who were extraordinary, notable Christians, such as the Apostles of the New Testament, the martyrs of the first two or three centuries, the outstanding monastics and mendicants like St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Teresa of Avila. There are many others who are honored who may or may not have been officially canonized by Roman Catholic authority but have become important to many Christians, like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, or Dorothy Day. That leaves All Souls' Day as a time to pray for the eternal welfare of all the ordinary, unknown Christians who didn't do anything heroic, like your parents (if they were baptized) or that devout old lady who used to babysit you.

However, I read something years ago, asserted by an Episcopalian priest and monk, that has stuck with me ever since. He said that originally, "all the saints" meant all baptized Christians, living and departed, heroic or average, virtuous or sinful. In the letters of the New Testament, Peter and Paul refer to what we could call the Church, capital C, as the saints. Anyone who has confessed faith in Jesus and been baptized in the Trinity is a saint, sanctified, made holy, destined for heaven.

The souls, according to this priest, for whom we pray on the day following All Saints meant everybody else: everyone who had died outside the Church, whether members of another religion, or Christians who had turned bad and died at odds with God. In this theology, anyone who hadn't confessed Jesus and been baptized was destined for hell, but the Church took one day to pray explicitly for their salvation, for a second chance that they might or might not get.

Do I believe that anyone who isn't a Christian will have some kind of punishment after death? No, I don't. But this older theology does explain the fear and trembling of the old Requiem Mass texts, the fear that even a Christian soul might fall into the pains of hell, the bottomless pit, the lion's mouth, Tartarus, the eternal darkness, without the guidance of the archangel Michael, the standard-bearer, and the prayers of the faithful still on earth.

What I do believe, as an Episcopalian but also a polytheist, is that anyone who has devotion and faith in a deity will be received by that deity after death, unless they have so deeply offended that deity's values as to make it impossible. To use a standard sort of example, I would assume that Joseph Stalin was baptized into the Orthodox Church as an infant, but having rejected all religion and carried out many atrocities in pursuit of his own power and security, he wouldn't want to be with Jesus even if Jesus invited him. I believe that Jesus is willing to receive anyone who turns to him, at whatever point in their life or afterlife.

However, not everyone has a devotion to a deity, or follows a school of spiritual practice. Not everyone even gets a formal burial. The Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead assumes that death is confusing, disorienting, and frightening; it attempts to offer direction to the dying or dead person, if not to enlightenment, then to a rebirth with a chance at enlightenment. I think that if a person isn't spiritually aware to a certain extent, their experience of death might not be heaven or hell, purgatory or reincarnation, but a sort of dull, shadowy half-life, as implied by the Hebrew Sheol, most of the Greek underworld, and the realm of Hel in Norse mythology--a place with neither punishment nor joy, no torment, no fulfillment, no meaning.

It is of those souls I think on All Souls' Day and through the month of November as the temperatures drop (though not as far as they used to), as the winds start to whine and howl around the corners of my building, as the texts of the liturgy increasingly look forward to Advent, to the promise of the Second Coming and the remaking of all things. It is for them I have lit a candle and put out a glass of pure water, not exactly an Anglican custom but not in opposition to the prayers of the Church. A little water for refreshment, a little light in the darkness. Follow the sound of voices singing, "O quam gloriosum est...." There is a way home through the dark for all of us.

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