Like Christmas Eve without Christmas
The New York Times, of all places, has a short essay on All Saints Day and the metaphorical and tangible reasons behind such a day. "A Date With the Departed" is not from a Christian perspective, but it touches on the heart of the issue of what All Saints Day is for, and why it is a problem the American culture does not participate in it in some fashion. In other words, we celebrate the All Hallows Eve (Halloween) with out having the All Hallows Day (All Saints Day). That’s kind of like celebrating Christmas Eve and never having Christmas.
Thomas Lynch writes:
Each stone on which we carve our names and dates is an effort to
make a human statement about death, memory and belief. Our kind was
here. They lived; they died; they made their difference. For the
ancient and the modern, the grave is an essential station. But
less so, lately, especially here in the United States, where we whistle
past our graveyards and keep our dead at greater distance, consigned to
oblivions we seldom visit, estranged and denatured, tidy and
Disney-fied memorial parks with names like those of golf courses or
megachurches.
The Disneyfication of our death rituals have caused a great reversal in how we approach life, death, and dying. Professor June Hobbs of Gardner-Webb University speaks "to a culture that quietly turned the family ‘parlor’ into a ‘living room,’ the ‘burial policy’ into ‘life insurance’ and the
funeral into a ‘celebration of life,’ often notable for the absence of
a corpse, and the subtle enforcement of an emotional code that approves
the good laugh but not the good cry. Convenience and economy have
replaced ethnic and religious customs."
In the larger culture’s quest to escape death and live eternally through convenience and economy a reversal has been made in culture signs and symbols:
The dead get buried but we seldom see a grave. Or they are burned, but
few folks ever see the fire. Photographs of coffins returned from wars
are forbidden, and news coverage of soldiers’ burials is discouraged.
Where sex was once private and funerals were public, now sex is
everywhere and the dead go to their graves often as not without witness
or ritual.
The only public funerals in the larger culture now are when celebrities, politicians, or police officers die. We as Christians must begin to recover the rituals of death that we have let go of because the larger culture tells us so, much in the way that we should focus more on incarnation and less on gift-giving consumerism during Christmas season. During this Halloween season you can argue about whether it is appropriate for a Christian to dress up and "trick or treat?" We shold also add a discussion to the mix: what are we going to do about the day after Halloween?
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Thomas,
Thanks for pointing to that essay and offering your thoughts. As I was reading your post I started to ask myself, “where else am I celebrating Christmas Eve with out Christmas?” Unfortunately, the list became quite long. Over the past 5-8 years I have learned of the Church calender and have tried to understand the value of it, this was a surprising difficult thing having grown up in an evangelical home. But I’m slowly realizing the depth and value of the whole Holy Week (not just Easter) and Pentecost and the rest.
Thanks again for posting. I am blessed with your writing and Everyday Liturgy. May the Lord increase your tribe.
I’m surprised you observe that Thomas Lynch’s op-ed is “not from a Christian perspective”. Lynch is in fact emphatically Christian, a Roman Catholic who has practiced faithfully throughout the course of his life, growing up the son of an undertaker in Milford, Michigan, and than assuming responsibility for the business that had been owned by his father. I’ve heard him presenting several times at Calvin College’s “Festival of Faith and Literature”: and it’s his Christian faith that makes him so credible when he writes on human mortality.
One thinks of what was once said by Carl Braaten, a Lutheran theologian, something on the order of, “When one speaks of the deepest concerns of the human condition, one is speaking a christian truth, even when the words are not articulated as such.”
Allen
Read through the lens of the Braaten quote I would agree in part with you. I do think it is okay to characterize Lynch’s op-ed as "not from a Christian perspective" because he is giving a broad, generalized overview and critique of death and ritual in America today, not a specific Christian approach to All Saints Day. An Op-Ed in an explicitly Christian perspective would include Christian ritual and a Christian perspective on saints and the Body of Christ.
There is certainly nothing wrong in my mind with giving a generalized view of such things, especially in a secular paper like the New York Times. He wrote a piece that meets his audience where they are. And in no way do I mean to question his Christianity.