Thank you for this article. The fact that our technocratic elites, governments and health authorities are prohibiting people from properly laying their dead to rest marks our civilization, in historical context, as outright barbarians. (With apologies to those nations we now know from recent studies of the early Middle Ages were in fact highly developed in their own right.) Even during the 1665 bubonic plague of London, while the “plague pits” (mass graves) were being dug, a priest was required to be present to bless the dead. It wasn’t by any means a full and proper memorial service, but it was more than we’re being allowed today, thanks to exaggerated, unscientific fears about COVID. This is a travesty, an obscenity. John Ralston Saul, author of Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (a must-read), wrote nearly 30 years ago of our technocratic elites: “The technocrats of our day make the old aristocratic leaders seem profound and civilized by comparison. …by any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, (they are) virtually illiterate. One of the reasons that (they are) unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and (they have) little knowledge of (their) own civilization.”
Judy Englander
3 years ago
This article has opened my eyes to the significance of the days from late October to mid November. I hadn’t made the connection between Remembrance Sunday and All Saints’ and All Souls’ (Halloween). There’s also the natural backdrop you didn’t mention: most foliage is visibly dying around us as we head into the dead – or ‘sleeping’ – season of winter. Almost certainly there are more ancient memories of festivals that commemorate the annual round of nature. Fire-lighting for the dead could be a fag-end of this, as is Bonfire Night.
Kester John
3 years ago
Years ago I attended a Samhain (Halloween) outdoor pagan ceremony where the priestess talked about the veil between the worlds being thing and our being close to those who had gone before. The next morning,. November 1 I attended a C of E service where the priest said the same words. This time of year always has this “vibe” however you clothe it. The old “Bonfire Nights” of my youth before the resurgence of Halloween had the same energy. Penny for the Guy used to go door to door; now – trick or treat. And with the strong growth of neo paganism we have explicit ceremonies for the dead and the ancestors. Dumb Feasts are increasingly popular (where you set a table place for a departed one and put out some food or drink that was their favourite.) The Dia De Los Muertos has never been stronger in South America. And of course this period ends with Remebrance Day. So of course all the energies of death are connected with now before the light returns at yule tide and we celebrate Christmas. As for this time of year – Yeats said it best:
” A ghost may come; For it is a ghost’s right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Secularization has deeply impoverished Western Culture. The disenchantment and displacement or trivialization of the canon by science & tech has bereft us of our rich trove of symbol. The resultant inability to read metaphoric and symbolic expression has left us with an inability to address otherwise ineffable meanings such as death.
Edward Seymour
3 years ago
This is the most thought provoking piece I have read in some time. Thank you. Growing up in the suburbs of west London in the late 1940s and early 50s, I never heard of Hallow’een. Even as late as the 1960s as a teenager I never knew of it. When I discovered it I thought it was an American money making import, which perhaps in its present style it is. But nonetheless having read this piece, at least we can see that in its iconography it rekindles aspects of the original content. It is fascinating to hear that it was banned during the Reformation and yet still existed in pockets in the UK. It seems that all ceremonies we have are simply additions to or bolted on to the most elemental and primeval myths and that most of those originated as markers and pauses between the seasons. It makes sense to celebrate the dead when the leaves are falling, and it makes sense that when a branch of Christianity banned that we were able to simply take November the fifth and still keep our bonfires. The additional ritual we are blessed with now is Remembrance Day which fits in with the same autumnal passage. I have also been reading Burke (“Reflections on the Revolution in France”) where he speaks of our lives and culture being a fusion of the dead, the living and the unborn. These ideas and this knowledge of where we fit in to the movement of life has never been more important given the cultural morass in which large numbers of intellectuals and intelligent people would prefer to tear the fabric of our world asunder and start, as it were from year zero: to start as though nothing had gone before and as though the dead had bequeathed us nothing and that we had nothing to bequeath those as yet unborn.
namelsss me
3 years ago
I was a little surprised at the alleged disappearance of All Souls’ commemoration having attended a sung requiem for the souls of the dead in our C of E church last night (All Souls’ Eve). We had of course celebrated All Saints in the morning. I think it a pity, though, in these days of both foreign terrorism and disparagement of parliament by the current Ottoman-Mogul regime, that people no longer celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Treason.
Sarah H
3 years ago
Strangely ‘bonfire night’ on the 5th is missed here. Guy Fawkes was a later addition. It is all part of the same turn of the year pagan solar year grouping predating Christianity. I am sure that the communication with the departed is ancient too.
Martin Price
3 years ago
I would take issue with the statement that “Britain doesn’t today have the kinds of widespread customs which are still common in Catholic countries, such as visiting churchyards to bring flowers or light candles on the graves of loved ones. “
It may be true in England, but in non-conformist and now secular Wales, the day for honouring the Dead and visiting cemeteries with flowers is Palm Sunday. You will find cemeteries in Wales bright with daffodils, celebrating Spring and eternal life.
As one of a small Catholic community when I was growing up in West Wales, we marked All Saints and All Souls with candles and Masses for the Dead , but the flowers were for Palm Sunday with everybody else.
Karen Lindquist
3 years ago
Thank you for this much needed essay on the importance of connecting with those who came before us and offering gratitude. I also feel this is a very important time of year to reflect and connect, and the pagan rituals mean a lot to me as we mark time and try to find meaning in our lives. These ceremonies are truly beautiful and I’m committed to holding on and reviving them since our modern holidays mean very little to me, and in fact often seem like nothing more than opportunities to promote capitalism and controlling attitudes about politics and religion.
Thomas Jefferson considered one of his greatest achievement the defeat and removal of the entail from Virginia law. The Feast of All Hallows, as Ms Parker indicates, entailed obligations as well as devotion to ancestors. Contrary to modernism, it recognized the continuum of human being; that we are each obligated to pay their debts and to preserve and perpetuate their gifts. The rejection of that ‘entail’, it’s impossible to miss in these times, is become comprehensively catastrophic. A contemporary Dante would find Locke & Knox and their epigone, Jefferson & Hamilton, in the ninth circle.
Stephen Morris
3 years ago
Fascinating, thank you. Chimes with the shortened days and loss of foliage.
Michael Whittock
3 years ago
It’s good to encounter the Clerk of Oxford in a different setting. Medieval people lived with death very close at hand. Loved ones generally died at home under the care of an extended family who were also involved in preparing the body for burial. Death was a constant companion and people feared it, held it in awe and learnt its lessons. We are shielded from death. Today it is dealt with by doctor, hospital,hospice, the police and funeral director. It has been said that the Victorians were obsessed with death and refused to talk about sex. We however are obsessed with sex and refuse to talk about death. In fact we try to ignore it or minimise it. We surround it with sentimentality and presumptious beliefs and refuse to learn its lessons. As a parish priest I took many funerals and witnessed a gradual sentimentalisation of death. Princess Diana’s funeral was a game changer in this regard. It accelerated the trend to want “personal” funerals with an emphasis on the loved one’s life which often ended up making them sound like saints. There was sometimes an attempt to downplay the reality and challenge of death and to marginalise God. Incredibly at Diana’s funeral He was mentioned 3times and Jesus once. The Resurrection was mentioned once and neither God the Father nor His Son were mentioned in the 3 hymns, nor in the Reading. The rest of the service was centred in Diana. We have also surrounded death with presumptious beliefs which have no basis in the Christian Faith. Basically it is asserted that when everyone dies they will go straight to Heaven. There isn’t even the very questionable belief in a purgatorial interlude in which we are made fit to stand before the holy God. Of course everyone has the right to believe what they want, but it is presumptious in the extreme to call it Christian unless it adheres to the body of Christian doctrine which has its roots in the Bible, our final authority. Basically the Christian belief is that our eternal destiny depends on our response to Jesus Christ. Do we believe in Him or not? Do we have a relationship with Him through faith,prayer and worship believing that He died for our sins that we could have eternal life. This relationship is open to everyone. It’s a wonderful,transforming experience in this life and gives great assurance for the next. When death comes the Christian believer will go straight to be with Christ in spirit. When Jesus returns at the end of time all will be raised to life, believer and unbeliever. There will then be the Judgement at which the eternal destiny of each person will be settled. There is no second chance, no purgatory. This is the most important lesson death can teach us. As far as our relationship with the dead are concerned I believe the Church of England has got it right. We should commend everyone to the love and mercy of God realising at the same time that there is no point in praying for them in any long term way because for them the die is cast. As a society we should learn once again to hold death in awe and not sentimentalise it. We should certainly hear what it is saying to us about our mortality and vulnerability, judgement, repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and the possibility of Eternal Life.
Thank you for this article. The fact that our technocratic elites, governments and health authorities are prohibiting people from properly laying their dead to rest marks our civilization, in historical context, as outright barbarians. (With apologies to those nations we now know from recent studies of the early Middle Ages were in fact highly developed in their own right.) Even during the 1665 bubonic plague of London, while the “plague pits” (mass graves) were being dug, a priest was required to be present to bless the dead. It wasn’t by any means a full and proper memorial service, but it was more than we’re being allowed today, thanks to exaggerated, unscientific fears about COVID. This is a travesty, an obscenity. John Ralston Saul, author of Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (a must-read), wrote nearly 30 years ago of our technocratic elites: “The technocrats of our day make the old aristocratic leaders seem profound and civilized by comparison. …by any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization, (they are) virtually illiterate. One of the reasons that (they are) unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and (they have) little knowledge of (their) own civilization.”
This article has opened my eyes to the significance of the days from late October to mid November. I hadn’t made the connection between Remembrance Sunday and All Saints’ and All Souls’ (Halloween). There’s also the natural backdrop you didn’t mention: most foliage is visibly dying around us as we head into the dead – or ‘sleeping’ – season of winter. Almost certainly there are more ancient memories of festivals that commemorate the annual round of nature. Fire-lighting for the dead could be a fag-end of this, as is Bonfire Night.
Years ago I attended a Samhain (Halloween) outdoor pagan ceremony where the priestess talked about the veil between the worlds being thing and our being close to those who had gone before. The next morning,. November 1 I attended a C of E service where the priest said the same words. This time of year always has this “vibe” however you clothe it. The old “Bonfire Nights” of my youth before the resurgence of Halloween had the same energy. Penny for the Guy used to go door to door; now – trick or treat. And with the strong growth of neo paganism we have explicit ceremonies for the dead and the ancestors. Dumb Feasts are increasingly popular (where you set a table place for a departed one and put out some food or drink that was their favourite.) The Dia De Los Muertos has never been stronger in South America. And of course this period ends with Remebrance Day. So of course all the energies of death are connected with now before the light returns at yule tide and we celebrate Christmas. As for this time of year – Yeats said it best:
” A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”
Secularization has deeply impoverished Western Culture. The disenchantment and displacement or trivialization of the canon by science & tech has bereft us of our rich trove of symbol. The resultant inability to read metaphoric and symbolic expression has left us with an inability to address otherwise ineffable meanings such as death.
This is the most thought provoking piece I have read in some time. Thank you. Growing up in the suburbs of west London in the late 1940s and early 50s, I never heard of Hallow’een. Even as late as the 1960s as a teenager I never knew of it. When I discovered it I thought it was an American money making import, which perhaps in its present style it is. But nonetheless having read this piece, at least we can see that in its iconography it rekindles aspects of the original content. It is fascinating to hear that it was banned during the Reformation and yet still existed in pockets in the UK. It seems that all ceremonies we have are simply additions to or bolted on to the most elemental and primeval myths and that most of those originated as markers and pauses between the seasons. It makes sense to celebrate the dead when the leaves are falling, and it makes sense that when a branch of Christianity banned that we were able to simply take November the fifth and still keep our bonfires. The additional ritual we are blessed with now is Remembrance Day which fits in with the same autumnal passage. I have also been reading Burke (“Reflections on the Revolution in France”) where he speaks of our lives and culture being a fusion of the dead, the living and the unborn. These ideas and this knowledge of where we fit in to the movement of life has never been more important given the cultural morass in which large numbers of intellectuals and intelligent people would prefer to tear the fabric of our world asunder and start, as it were from year zero: to start as though nothing had gone before and as though the dead had bequeathed us nothing and that we had nothing to bequeath those as yet unborn.
I was a little surprised at the alleged disappearance of All Souls’ commemoration having attended a sung requiem for the souls of the dead in our C of E church last night (All Souls’ Eve). We had of course celebrated All Saints in the morning.
I think it a pity, though, in these days of both foreign terrorism and disparagement of parliament by the current Ottoman-Mogul regime, that people no longer celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Treason.
Strangely ‘bonfire night’ on the 5th is missed here. Guy Fawkes was a later addition. It is all part of the same turn of the year pagan solar year grouping predating Christianity. I am sure that the communication with the departed is ancient too.
I would take issue with the statement that “Britain doesn’t today have the kinds of widespread customs which are still common in Catholic countries, such as visiting churchyards to bring flowers or light candles on the graves of loved ones. “
It may be true in England, but in non-conformist and now secular Wales, the day for honouring the Dead and visiting cemeteries with flowers is Palm Sunday. You will find cemeteries in Wales bright with daffodils, celebrating Spring and eternal life.
As one of a small Catholic community when I was growing up in West Wales, we marked All Saints and All Souls with candles and Masses for the Dead , but the flowers were for Palm Sunday with everybody else.
Thank you for this much needed essay on the importance of connecting with those who came before us and offering gratitude. I also feel this is a very important time of year to reflect and connect, and the pagan rituals mean a lot to me as we mark time and try to find meaning in our lives.
These ceremonies are truly beautiful and I’m committed to holding on and reviving them since our modern holidays mean very little to me, and in fact often seem like nothing more than opportunities to promote capitalism and controlling attitudes about politics and religion.
Thomas Jefferson considered one of his greatest achievement the defeat and removal of the entail from Virginia law. The Feast of All Hallows, as Ms Parker indicates, entailed obligations as well as devotion to ancestors. Contrary to modernism, it recognized the continuum of human being; that we are each obligated to pay their debts and to preserve and perpetuate their gifts. The rejection of that ‘entail’, it’s impossible to miss in these times, is become comprehensively catastrophic. A contemporary Dante would find Locke & Knox and their epigone, Jefferson & Hamilton, in the ninth circle.
Fascinating, thank you. Chimes with the shortened days and loss of foliage.
It’s good to encounter the Clerk of Oxford in a different setting.
Medieval people lived with death very close at hand. Loved ones generally died at home under the care of an extended family who were also involved in preparing the body for burial. Death was a constant companion and people feared it, held it in awe and learnt its lessons.
We are shielded from death. Today it is dealt with by doctor, hospital,hospice, the police and funeral director. It has been said that the Victorians were obsessed with death and refused to talk about sex. We however are obsessed with sex and refuse to talk about death. In fact we try to ignore it or minimise it. We surround it with sentimentality and presumptious beliefs and refuse to learn its lessons.
As a parish priest I took many funerals and witnessed a gradual sentimentalisation of death. Princess Diana’s funeral was a game changer in this regard. It accelerated the trend to want “personal” funerals with an emphasis on the loved one’s life which often ended up making them sound like saints. There was sometimes an attempt to downplay the reality and challenge of death and to marginalise God. Incredibly at Diana’s funeral He was mentioned 3times and Jesus once. The Resurrection was mentioned once and neither God the Father nor His Son were mentioned in the 3 hymns, nor in the Reading. The rest of the service was centred in Diana.
We have also surrounded death with presumptious beliefs which have no basis in the Christian Faith. Basically it is asserted that when everyone dies they will go straight to Heaven. There isn’t even the very questionable belief in a purgatorial interlude in which we are made fit to stand before the holy God.
Of course everyone has the right to believe what they want, but it is presumptious in the extreme to call it Christian unless it adheres to the body of Christian doctrine which has its roots in the Bible, our final authority.
Basically the Christian belief is that our eternal destiny depends on our response to Jesus Christ. Do we believe in Him or not? Do we have a relationship with Him through faith,prayer and worship believing that He died for our sins that we could have eternal life. This relationship is open to everyone. It’s a wonderful,transforming experience in this life and gives great assurance for the next. When death comes the Christian believer will go straight to be with Christ in spirit. When Jesus returns at the end of time all will be raised to life, believer and unbeliever. There will then be the Judgement at which the eternal destiny of each person will be settled. There is no second chance, no purgatory. This is the most important lesson death can teach us.
As far as our relationship with the dead are concerned I believe the Church of England has got it right. We should commend everyone to the love and mercy of God realising at the same time that there is no point in praying for them in any long term way because for them the die is cast. As a society we should learn once again to hold death in awe and not sentimentalise it. We should certainly hear what it is saying to us about our mortality and vulnerability, judgement, repentance and faith in Jesus Christ and the possibility of Eternal Life.