This is why today is one of the most spiritual days in the Church's calendar to me. Just beneath the Easter Triduum -- Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday -- sits the "November triduum" of All Hallows' Eve (Oct. 31), All Saints' (Nov. 1), All Souls' (Nov. 2).
I love talking to dead people.
Some years ago, as part of my ordination process, I was asked to pick three important spiritual writers who shaped me. I responded: "Julian of Norwich, St Gregory and Dietrich Bonhoeffer". "Can't you pick someone living?", the interviewer asked. "I went to Duke Divinity. They are still living", I said. He looked at me oddly but carried on.
I love talking to dead people.
Which explains why I'm fascinated to visit cemeteries. I read them like I read books. I learn from them. I enjoy visiting cemeteries because I feel like I need to converse with the dead. I find it an important part of my spiritual life. The dead tell you things the living do not. Some of my favorite cemeteries are old English ones. Cemeteries are great places to learn from the dead. Which is probably why we don't see the dead in America anymore.
But why is that? Thanatologists say that the modern era is characterized by "the pornography of death". That is, the subject of death is considered to be morbid and inappropriate talk for polite company. Death is risqué and not for public viewing.
It wasn't always this way.
Visit really old parish cemeteries and you'll see that.
We used to live with the dead. We were born in our homes and we died in our homes. Our dead bodies were viewed in the parlor of the home. The wake was in the home. We were buried next to the church or on the homestead property, in a family cemetery. And our cemeteries were next to our church, a building which also functioned as our school and the town hall. In those days, children played among the dead, church assembled with the dead, and the body politic deliberated with the dead.
Then came the funeral industry at the end of the Civil War. We began to die in hospitals. Our bodies were not taken home but to the "funeral home". Cemeteries began to be displaced from the center of spiritual and public life, planted not at the center but on the edges of town. Tombstones were replaced with markers level with the ground so you could drive by and not know, not see, that the dead were close. Eventually, homemaker magazines noted that the parlor was no longer being occupied by the dead. So they reclaimed it from the dead by calling it the "living room".
And just like that, the dead were out of our homes and our very lives. It became harder and harder and harder to find the dead, to see the dead, to learn from the dead. But there has remained one lone failure in the communal hushing of the dead. There remains one exception to the hegemony of the living. One night out of the year when the dead ring door bells. When you can talk to them. When the dead even get their own day: El Dia de Muertos.
Today I'll sing Bishop How's "For All the Saints" as robustly as I know how.
Today I'll pray The Great Litany and relish in the supplications: "Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses of our forefathers; neither reward us according to our sins. Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and by thy mercy preserve us forever". "That it may please thee to grant that, in the fellowship of all the saints, we may attain to thy heavenly kingdom". "Preserve us from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder and sudden death".
Today I'll say prayers for those who have died and now rest from their labors in the Church Militant, having joined that choir invisible and Church Triumphant.
Today I'll honor brothers and sisters who are teachers and conversation partners -- folks like Julian, Gregory, and Dietrich.
I love talking to the dead. Which is why I love this season of the Church year. A reminder that, to us Resurrection People, the dead aren't dead. They're not as far out of our lives as our culture wants us to believe.
"So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3.1-3).