(#16/52) All Saints, All Souls: to Remember Our Dead & Living
Today is All Saint’s Day, a celebration of our past ancestors, friends, loved ones, and history-makers, our ones who we hold in remembrance. Around the world, and in Latin American indigenous cultures in particular, people raise altars and reflect upon the passing of their people from life to death.
In this era of constant updates, we are hard pressed to find time to remember, to reflect, to practice memory, to lean into rituals. Rather, we are thrust constantly into a stream of consciousness with minute to minute news cycles that feel inescapable.
How do we find time to remember in a culture that urges us to live by forgetting?
This week has been a bevvy of death and threats and crimes against humanity, and we’ve all been stunned over and over by the depth of what our people can do to each other in fits of hysteria and racially motivated rage. In a beautiful, must-read reflection on the Jewish burial and mourning practices of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, Emma Green writes about the preparation and ministry of being with the bodies of the dead as they lay their friends and family to rest: “Jewish tradition teaches that the dead cannot be left alone. ..Others say that the soul, or nefesh, is connected to the body until it is buried, or even for days afterward, and people must be present as it completes its transition into the next world.”
Green, also a student of religion as well as a writer, regards the rituals as a safe haven for the grieving people of Tree of Life, having suffered the worst antisemitic hate crime on American soil: “The structure was there; the tradition told them what to do. Wait with the body until it can be buried. Pray over the murdered souls. You lay a table for me in view of my enemies, reads Psalm 23. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows.”
In the background of our national death and mourning is the news of the marching caravan of asylum-seekers which began in Honduras. Reporting from the scene have been many different journalists and documentarians, with a first-hand perspective of what is going on.
Alice Driver, reporting at CNN, writes about a family with young children, who came on the caravan from Guatemala. After losing stable income and unable to provide for their daughters, they decided to risk their entire lives to make the journey. She writes about perhaps the youngest member of the caravan, a 27 day old baby named Rachel, and her mother Yesenia who recently had a C-Section:
“Yesenia, who had delivered via C-section, was unable to carry anything except Rachel, and she and Rachel depended on the kindness of strangers to give them a ride while her husband walked long, hot miles each day pushing the other two girls in a stroller. Were Rachel, Yesenia and their family the “bad thugs” and “gang members” of the migrant caravan that Trump had warned of on Twitter?”
Many reporters on the trail posted photos of the caravan stopping to rest and watch the film “Coco” on a solar-powered projector system. The caravan, we find out, is filled with children and their parents. Families on a path to seek a better life.
The truth of who these people are — asylum-seekers coming to America — should be drawing an outpouring of faith-based and community support. After all, every single American who is not of Native descent arrived to this country. But instead, we learn our nation is sending troops to the border, in what appears to be an extremely expensive political stunt which will throw away tens of millions of our tax dollars, tied up in racist language (what we have come to expect) and vile speech from the Trump administration. Instead, we learn our president is casually throwing around the idea of taking away birthright citizenship to children of immigrants.
68% of white evangelicals (a large voting block for the Trump vision of America) believe the US has no responsibility to house refugees. This is wrong. Christian Americans in this country have become so complacent that they can’t even view the faithful believers on a caravan from other countries as their own spiritual kin. That is wrong and it is not the gospel.
“God is the one who will decide if we make it,” said one woman. “Trump doesn’t have that power.”
Would that professing people of faith in this country view her statement as true.
In a connection so disturbing and offensive it almost doesn’t feel right talking about, we find out that the killer was fueled by a hate for Jews guided in some part by anger at their hospitality, refugee-oriented welcoming work, their practices of sanctuary. These ideas fueled directly from the voicebox at the top: Donald Trump’s language of “invaders” surrounding the caravan.
In studying the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the idea of remembrance is so powerful that there is an entire book devoted to it: Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is the story of the Hebrew people leaving one place and migrating to another.
“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.” Deut 8:7–10
They are constantly called to remember who is bringing them there. To be humble. Not to forget where they came from.
How do we honor our dead? What ways do we remember, and not forget? How will this practice drive us to remember those who are still living?
How can we again say, we will remember you? We will not forget you.
