Thoughts on All Saints' Day

Everyone revels in Halloween. I haven't really liked that holiday much, if holiday it be, since I was a child. I cannot quite get why people want to decorate their lawns with fake graves out of which fake skeleltons protrude. It is quite enough to spend life preparing for the real, and very unglamorous real thing. As for me, in case I haven't mentioned to you, my friends, or written it down somewhere, I would like to be cremated, not buried. The idea of decaying slowly somehow is less appealing than being quickly reduced to quasi-ash. I had not intended to go down this rather gloomy road. In fact, actually, I am not feeling gloomy at all about death today, if only because I have the faith that my body and soul each are in the hands of a loving God. It's the after death part that is the real celebration, of course, assuming the judgment part goes well. I shall not speculate on myself in that regard in these pages.

Today, Christians remember the saints in heaven, the ones in purgatory, and the rest on earth. Our friends and family who have trod the road before us.

We pray for them and for their intervention with the God to whom they are now closer than we. We remember the part they had in our lives for which we are grateful throughout the time that remains to us.

I thought of two of those individuals in my life today. This morning I woke up to the music of the 40s. It seemed odd because I listen to a talk radio station that as far as I know has no music, except for the bumpers between subject segments and commercials. Tommy Dorsey, Ray Anthony, Gene Krupa, the Andrews Sisters. I was familiar with so many of the songs of the Big Bands, not because I was there then. I was about ten to fifteen years away from the heyday. I could remember them from my childhood in the Bronx, watching my parents and aunts and uncles dancing in tiny living rooms at holiday parties. My dad was a particularly good dancer. It turned out that I had hit the FM button sometime in the night and the channel was 88.1, a jazz station, revisiting the decade between 1940 and 1950. I did not stir for forty or more minutes to keep the connection to dad. I have been surprised at how much I miss him. I trusted him with the fullness of my ups and downs that he never failed to try to solve. Ah, yes, friends have seen some of it, and I am grateful for their tolerance, but they would run away screaming if they had complete and untempered exposure. If I could run away from me at those times, I would. And he was my biggest fan, the one who would tape all of my utterings on college radio for as he would would say, perhaps a bit with tongue in cheek, but not much, "posterity". I don't know about any posterity, but it is sometimes nice to see his handwriting on the back of the cassettes he so painstakingly dubbed from his reel to reel. Is he keeping an eye on me? Sometimes I think yes, very strongly. I hope so. Dad, I am not quite getting the message about a couple of things. Was it you who caused me to lock myself out of your old apartment, the one I still have, empty, one year and eight months after you left it for the last time? I thought so, at first, telling me not to spend money for some California Closet renovation right now. He was a bit of a skeptic about religion, even after he joined Catholicism when he was 85. I wonder. What was it like for him to find out that there is someplace after, for real? I wonder. It is my faith that he did, I mean find out that there was someplace after. I would like to hear, somehow, how that has impacted him. But I guess if he could do that, he'd be giving away the fact of faith, and it wouldn't be faith, if I had his unequivocal message confirming it. His name went first on the souls to pray for today, one of the saints. The other was someone I met in my late 30's, a man in whom I trusted the fullness of my thoughts, hopes and fears, and what secrets I have borne about my deepest self. It was a platonic relationship for me of the deepest level-- the best description of which I have only read by a 17th or 18th century writer, DeMontaigne. I was one of many people who had that experience of him I would discover and that in no way diminished it. When he died, the line went out the funeral home in rain to pay respects. I remember one who had not seen him in 20 years and credited him with her choice of career. His daughter said to me that when she has tried to describe him, people did not quite believe her. He was kind, and whole. He made it to the other side of his obstacles and found and gave love. He reveled in his wife and family. He was grateful for every moment he had, which was lucky because he died so young. He would laugh to hear me call him a saint. But he too now has the evidence of whatever is the manifestation of heaven in union with Him of which he, like my father, was skeptical. They were only two of those who were part of my prayers and the prayers of the gathered today on this day of saints. What a celebration to have them with us today!