I wanted to write about where we could be a week from today, which by my calendar is the day after election day, when, depending on your politics, the world will have either been saved or ended.
Except, I think we’d agree in the heat of the hyper-partisan atmosphere in which we are all trying to live, neither outcome will be true. And I apologize that’s not a more cheerful insight to offer you while also exhorting you to use your vote as your voice next Tuesday.
Lost in the trick-or-treating, costuming and who-knows-what is that Monday’s Halloween began as All Hallows Eve (Vigil of the Solemnity of All Saints), a reference to yesterday's Feast of All Saints (which in these commercial endorsement times, you may be surprised is NOT an extra value meal offered by a fast-food chain).
As a grade schooler who found himself a pupil of the Sisters of Charity (not that many of us saw much of that) at Saint Peter School, New Brunswick, New Jersey, we knew All Saints' Day was a holy day of obligation.
I came of age, if not reason, in the Catholic Church as Vatican II was just beginning so things like celebrating the Mass in English rather than in Latin or, more significantly, being able to attend Mass on Saturday afternoon to satisfy the Sunday obligation simply did not exist. I know, what a kid remembers, right?
Today, All Souls' Day, however, was for me the saddest of all the dates on the calendar (ours in the kitchen had the names of saints in the date blocks for every day with sometimes more than just one saint’s name in the block).
Considering what a hash I have made of the faith into which I was born and baptized, I will not be amazed if I got this part wrong tool but in my memory, we have Three Churches: The Church Triumphant (those who have died and gone to heaven), The Church Militant (those of us still on earth) and The Church Suffering (those who have died in a state of grace but who still have penance to do for their sins and so they are in Purgatory).
That last group was the people we always prayed for in Catholic school and the part I used to find especially sad was the notion that there was no fixed amount of time a soul stayed in Purgatory. So, you could be praying, I thought pragmatically, as a child of eight, for someone who either had made it to Heaven or was still suffering. I suspect His Holiness and the Curia would shake their heads in bewilderment at my concerns
The part I never understood was what happened to souls in Purgatory when everyone they had known while on earth had also died because now they had no one left who remembered them and who could pray for them. Being abandoned for all eternity terrified me, and it still does. That we always had All Souls Day just as daylight saving time was ending and darkness fell everywhere and earlier made it all that much more frightening.
I'm not sure what happened to my childhood faith but on this one day of each year, and I'm not certain I'm helping anyone with any prayer I could offer (considering the source), I still say one anyway, just in case.
-bill kenny
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