Ofrenda

 

Pastor’s Epistle—October 2020

Every month I write one of these epistles in order to touch base with the congregation, to inform our community of upcoming events, and to attempt to impart a deeper meaning to the turning of both the natural and liturgical seasons around us. In this way I hope to reveal how mundane life is in fact saturated with the sacred, how the human and divine intersect in the everyday things of hearth and home, labor and prayer.

But that’s not much of a problem come October, is it? No, indeed. October is one of only two months, it seems to me, when modern Americans allow ourselves to indulge fully in the otherworldly, the spooky, the magical unseen. October has become in fact one long Halloween: 31 days when the veil between death and life, this world and the next, stretches so diaphanously thin as to prove transparent.

At Halloween you can be anything, anyone: a rock god, a movie star, a werewolf or a fairy. You can indulge in fantasy, in superstition, in a good and hearty scare. The usual boundaries are broken down. The usual rules don’t apply. And we do love it so.

I shan’t attempt a history of the Hallowtide here below. That’s a longer story for another day, and one I’ve tried to tell before. Suffice to say that Halloween serves as a sort of safety valve, an indulgence in the forbidden and the taboo. And because of that we like to pretend that it’s many things it really is not. We say, for example, that Halloween is pagan, but its connections to pre-Christian tradition are really rather tenuous and wildly exaggerated. We say that it’s ancient, when in fact most everything we associate with Halloween can be traced to the twentieth century.

Few would associate the Hallowtide with Church, yet it is a deeply Christian holiday, honoring the early martyrs of our faith. And this delight in death—the mockery of the grave—stems from our veneration of relics, the bones of saints beneath our altars, the liturgies we celebrated deep within the catacombs, atop the tombs of our dead. Christ has conquered death and hell. Christ has broken up the grave. What then have Christians to fear, when the mysterious alchemy of the Cross has transformed death to life?

It’s okay to be macabre. It’s okay to dance in the face of death, and thereby know what it is to truly be alive. Why, this is the very stuff of resurrection, the heart of Christian faith. And I cannot help but think it healthy, to dance a bit with bones, when we live in the midst of a culture that vehemently denies death, hiding it, sanitizing it, packaging it for consumption in violent films and shows, safely distanced behind our glowing screens.

“Buy the right stuff, make the right choices, and you will never die. You’ll never be sick or old.” Or so our culture claims. Yet we know the truth, don’t we? We all must pay the Reaper. Thanks be to God that we have a King who knows the way out of the grave.

And remember always the flipside of Hallowtide, the light dawning amidst the darkness of the season: Christmas is coming! Together these two, October and December, form an American dyad of life and death, light and dark, the ghoulish and the gleeful. Little wonder we can’t seem to get enough of these two holidays. Little wonder that they complement and work so well together.

This year I’d like to do a little something different here at St Peter’s. I’m not sure that this is the year for pumpkin labyrinths and graveyard vespers—though I haven’t given up on the latter. Rather, I’d like to take a page from our Latin American brothers and sisters, and set up an ofrenda in the narthex of our church. We already have that spare altar just sitting there. Why not decorate it in memory of those we’ve loved and lost?

An ofrenda is a home altar dedicated to family members who have died. For the Day of the Dead, one decorates the ofrenda with photographs of our late loved ones surrounding the Cross, along with a couple pots of marigolds, “the flower of the dead.” I encourage us all to bring to St Peter’s pictures of those whom we’ve lost, especially in recent years, for remembrance this October, for the Hallowtide, the feasts of All Souls and All Saints.

We will give thanks to God for the time we had with them, and especially for the promise in Christ that we will see them again. We are Resurrection people, after all, followers of Jesus who believe in a Kingdom which is “already and not yet.” Death has no sting for the Baptized, for we have already passed from death unto life.

That ultimately is the meaning of the Hallowtide. That ultimately is the hope for us all.

In Jesus. Amen.