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Category Archives: "All Souls Day"

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The Mighty Ginkgo Tree.

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This year our huge Ginkgo Tree dropped all its leaves on Nov.2, All Souls Day.  Oaks and maples lose their leaves over many days in the Fall but the Ginkgo does it all in one day.

On All Saints Day, we had a hard freeze here in Morris.  The next day, our golden-leaved Ginkgo tree unveiled itself slowly as all the leaves fell away within a few hours.

The Ginkgo tree is a huge presence in our neighborhood. It dominates the eastern edge of the school yard and when Fall comes the tree shines with bright yellow leaves every sunny morning.

Our schoolchildren try to guess on which day all the leaves will fall.  They are awed when without warning a cascade of fluttering golden leaves slowly then more rapidly begins to fall from the highest branches. This shedding usually catches the kids by surprise but soon they are running underneath the tree with arms outstretched trying to catch leaves with the same enthusiasm with which they will greet our first snow.

Although the Ginkgo tree is native to China it does well in the Midwest climate.  The species belongs is the last of what the botanists know as gymnosperms. Its leaves are fan-shaped with prominent veins running from the base out to the edge of the leaf. No other leaves look like the Ginkgo’s.

When all those bright yellow leaves begin to fall, If you didn’t know it, you’d think the tree was dying. In a single day, this huge tree suddenly succumbs to cold. For the rest of the fall and Winter the skeleton of our tree will stand there resisting numbing cold and wind-blown snow.

Spring will bring our tree’s resurrection as its new leaves begin to open, and look for all the world like deep green flower buds, and then open wide like small, delicate verdant sea shells.

One elderly woman told me one day that she was going to die –on that day! I said, “How do you know that?” “I don’t know… I just feel like I’m dying.  I can’t describe it.  I feel like I am shedding.” (By the way, she lived on for another year.)

I guess leaving this life will be a letting go of all my possessions, all my dreams, all my relationships. That will be a kind of shedding of this life and all its wonders. I will stand bare of it all and rest until the stirring of new life moves again in me.

 

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Our Titanic Catholic Church is Sinking.

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The titanic Catholic church in America is sinking. I think this is happening because: 1. Young people are drifting away from a church that seems irrelevant to them.  2. Our priests preach the Gospel out of the shadows of the sex scandal. 3. Secular culture in our country does not respect holiness and even a Catholic president champions the federal right to abortions. Our bishops seem not to notice that the titanic Catholic Church has sprung titanic leaks.

           Vultures are circling.  

What is the response of the leaders of the Catholic Church in the USA to these issues?  Recently, the Bishop’s conference announced a liturgical bombshell: From now on all prayers at their conclusion must omit “one” from prayers that end “…one God forever and ever.” The week before that edict the National Conference of U.S. Bishops issued a tweak to imposing ashes on Ash Wednesday.  Before that were detailed instructions on how to purify your hands before giving communion on the tongue.

Our titanic church is sinking, and our officers keep reminding us of the rules of etiquette necessary to continue with our formal dinners.

People are leaving the church because our leaders have failed us. Priests continue to sustain old Mass schedules while more and more people stay home. Around 30% of Catholics attend the Eucharist on Sunday.  The sacrament of Marriage is a rare occasion in many of our churches, though young people live together without seeing any need for vows or the other churchy stuff.

Priests increase opportunities for Confessions and the same penitents come to cleanse their hearts of every defect, every week. We used to refer to them as scrupulous Catholics, as sick at heart. Now, we indulge these people who search anxiously for purification but seem to miss the presence of Jesus in their lives.  How is it that the Sacrament of Reconciliation has become spiritual direction rather than an absolution and regeneration experience? By the way, despite canon law’s rule that Catholics confess once a year (if they are conscious of mortal sin in their lives) most Catholics haven’t received the sacrament in years and are not planning to, either.

Priests schedule Holy Hours attended weekly by a handful of isolated parishioners and proudly list those holy hours as something significant in church bulletins. I guess some priests think that simply going through the rite is enough.  Forgive an old priest’s musings, but I remember when Churches were filled for Forty Hours Devotions, and weekly Benediction was a powerful testimony to a believing Church.

By the way, why are our church doors shut and locked other than an hour before Mass and an hour afterward? What has happened to our belief in the sacred, real presence of Jesus in our churches? Why can’t I stop in my church anytime to pray?

Why hasn’t the Church proclaimed repentance and fasting in the face of the moral contagion that God has sent upon our lives? Why isn’t there a cry from the Church calling the Z-generation to the Church? I think young people are fleeing the Church because we are irrelevant to them. And they are right when they say “No one notices that I am missing. You don’t need me, and I don’t need you.”  Our church is d-u-l-l! And has no skin in the game of life that our people live each day.

I don’t have much courage, either. But I am not a leader. Our Church cries out for direction. We need inspired leadership in our Church. Our members are worried about dangerous icebergs. Where are the ice captains, those who can guide us through these frigid, dangerous waters?

 

 

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Alternative Halloween: "El Dia de los Muertos," "The Day of the Dead."

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For a completely different observance of the season of death and dying, try the approach of Mexicans who each year observe, “ El Dia de los Muertos,” the “Day of the Dead” on  November 2, All Souls Day.
Although some Mexican communities have started to have a kind of Halloween on Oct. 31, Halloween has no cultural roots in Mexico. It is an artificial observance imported from the U.S. The familiar “Trick or treat” custom is foreign to the typical Mexican family who is not going to waste money on costumes.
 “The Day of the Dead,” however, is indigenous in origin and Christian in practice. It’s no coincidence that “El Dia de Los Muertos” occurs on November 2, All Souls Day. It’s a sacred day for most Mexicans. Halloween…not so much.
I once joined an observance of “El Dia de Los Muertos” in a cemetery on the outskirts of Oaxaca, in the state of the same name.
By the time I arrived on All Saints Day evening, the city cemetery was already teeming with people who were gathering at their family plots. Children joined their parents and grandparents to observe the customs of the day. No one was dressed in a Halloween costume.
 I carefully made my way among the gravesites where family members had erected small altars. Children and youth brought flowers and entire families laid out plates of food for themselves and for the deceased.  At one gravesite, Uncle Jose was remembered by a favorite hat, a cigar and a home-made tamale all laid respectfully on his tomb next to a shotglass of tequila.
It’s dark during the observance of the Day of the Dead, Halloween in Mexico. The only light comes from the flickering candles at each grave which reveal the faces of those who have come to spend the night with their dead. While guitars play softly, each family respects the devotions of their neighbors.
As a non-Mexican I was not uncomfortable with the spirituality of the observance. The idea of recalling that those who have gone before us are still with us seemed right to me. The living had come to share one night by walking among the spirits of the dead in the place where they still lived.
Observing the customs of El Dia de los Muertos is a way of making a friend of death, since we all will have to experience it. It is a solemn observance of the reality of the spirit world. 
The entire family stays with the spirits all night, eating and drinking and singing.  If the candle flickering on Tio Pepe’s grave suddenly catches a wisp of air and moves or gets unaccountably brighter or even goes out, that is proof that Tio is there. 
The families remain all night with the spirits of their loved ones and do not leave until sunrise.
All Souls day used to be observed by Catholics as a day to bring flowers to the burial sites of loved ones. We prayed there and tended our grave sites out of respect for the memory of those family members who had died.
Our All Souls Day observance is like the Day of the Dead and very unlike Halloween. On All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead, we ought to visit a cemetery and remember that for Christian believers life is changed not ended at death. 

 

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