Sunday, October 29, 2006 Mercado: Split-level Halloween By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
WITCH broomsticks and decors of bats, black cats and goblins festooned the dining room. Over Halloween dinner, spinning spooky stories shifted into high gear.
“This is the world’s shortest ghost story,” a friend volunteered. “Only one man survived a world nuclear war. As evening fell on a nuked landscape, he sat down in the only remaining chair of his shattered house. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door.” End of story.
“Thailand Princess Sirindhorn tells this,” responded another. The hospital elevator stopped, then opened at the third floor. A gaunt young man stepped forward to enter. But the doctor inside hastily punched the close button.
“Why didn’t you allow him in,” asked the slim lady standing next to the upset doctor. “Didn’t you see his red bracelet?” the physician replied. “Only those in the morgue wear that.” Lifting up her arm, the lady softly purred: “You mean like this?”
As the diners chuckled, the wife murmured: “Halloween or All Souls’ Day seem, what’s the word now? Bifurcated?” I replied:
“Words like ‘bifurcated’ send copy editors up the wall. What do you mean?”
“Half a world away, our granddaughter and playmates, go on Halloween trick-or-treat parties,” she explained. “Here, our grandchildren light candles at family graves—including ours sooner rather than later.” Oh…that one.
“It is a good and wholesome thought to pray for the dead,” declares the Book of Macabees, written thousands of years before Easter Sunday. And from its start, the Church prayed for those “who have been called from this life.”
By the year 998, Benedictine abbot Oddilo of Cluny picked Nov. 2 for this remembrance. The practice spread, as our packed churches and cemeteries will attest this Wednesday.
The living can help the departed, the teaching went, by asceticism’s trio of prayer, sacrifice and alms. They’d help atone for past transgressions, and pave entry into the Beatific Vision. “I believe in the communion of saints,” the Nicene Creed says.
These are honored on “All Saints Day” – or “All Hallows Eve.” Halloween marked the Celtic new year. In 1848, Irish immigrants brought those spooky costumes to the US where it continues today as a fun-filled kids’ feast. “All Souls” is marked the day after.
They reflect conviction in life beyond. “We give back to You who first gave them to us: our faithful dead, whose beauty and truth are even now in our hearts,” the ancient prayer goes. (For) death is only a horizon, and a horizon is the limit of our sight.
“We thank you for the labor and joys of these mortal years, We thank you for the deep sense of mystery that lies beyond our mortal dust…Lift us up, that we may see further, as one by one, You gather scattered families, from the distractions, strife and weariness of time, to the peace of eternity.”
The desire to “see further” echoes even in newsrooms. “Here come de-cajon stories,” an editor snapped. She meant humdrum stories that swamp news desks: Halloween parties, traffic jams, crammed cemeteries. “Is that all there’s to this?”
No, it’s not. The central realities remain beyond votive candles or cemeteries turned into two-day cities: life beyond a handful of ashes.
“We Filipinos use the idiom itaga mo sa bato to assert our utmost confidence,” this pastor writes. “Such were Job’s exact words: ‘Oh, that my words were engraved in rock forever…’”
They’re words of his primitive theology of the Resurrection: “I know that my Redeemer lives. And in the end, He will stand forth upon the earth. And after my skin shall have been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
Wednesday’s liturgy spotlights this reality. Vita mutatur, non tollitur, priests murmur in the Eucharist’s preface: “For unto your faithful, O Lord, life is changed, not taken away.” The theme resonates wherever religious or laymen pray the Liturgy of the Hours.
Above all, there’s the universal aching for assurance of what lies beyond the grave. “We’d all love to know that those who’ve gone before us, marked with the sign of faith, are at peace,” writes the Jesuit theologian Catalino Arevalo.
The Transfiguration allowed the Galilean’s friends to see, “for just a second,” what was beyond. “Their reaction was strange: they did not want to leave the spot. It’s “wonderful for us to be here.”
“What if we could ‘for only just a second,’ see people who’ve gone before us, in faith, especially those suddenly or tragically taken, in that place of light that is God’s promise? What if we, too, had some authentic experience of what ‘our eyes have not seen, nor our ears heard’?
“It is truly the better thing that an authentic extended experience is not given us—because we would not want to leave the spot. Better still because there is still so much of the humdrum, the frustrating, the difficult for us to endure, if possible with courage, to build some small beginnings of the Kingdom which Jesus wanted to make our work in this world.”
Whether in the dim catacombs off Rome’s Appian way, slightly unkempt Libingan ng mga Bayani or in garishly lighted cemeteries of Cebu, All Souls Day is about remembering those we loved and, frail mortals as we are, may have forgotten---and reaching out again to them.
“We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten,” Madre Maria mutters in “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” “But that love will have been enough…There is a land of the dead and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
