Today is holy in many cultures. Here in North America, we’ve nearly lost the holiness in a mess of candy chasing and best-costume prizes. This year is different as COVID rages and people choose to — or are made to — stay home. I would have anyway (solitude is my refreshment), but I have rarely felt so deeply the need, on this day, for spiritual connection. Pandemics can do that to you.
Ghosts of October 31 past grin at me from the wind storm shadows and tossing branches outside my tree-top windows. Many Hallowe’en parties, many All Hallows Eve vigils, some Dia De los Muertes (thank you Mariachi Ghost!) celebrations, some Samhain gatherings. But this is the first time I’ve watched the full moon rise and understood the meaning of the night, looked for the ending and beginning that my heritage (Irish and Catholic) teaches me.
My grandmothers and great-grandmothers for generations prepared in vigil for the Feast of All Saints on November 1. They would have kept, and slowly lost, the memories of an earlier time, a time when the great fire festival at Tlachtga in Meath marked the passing from the light half to the dark half of the year.
I imagine wandering back to Ireland, slipping into their Rosary circle, letting their prayers lead me deeper into memory, to ancient times, until we glimpse the brightness of the Samhain fire far across the island from my grandmothers’ homes.
“This is a momentous time in the lives of a people to whom the changing of the seasons was a matter of life and death.”
https://www.newgrange.com/tlachtga.htm
What did they do when they saw the beautiful light? Samhain was the end and beginning of the year, the last gifts of the precious harvest stored, the thinning of the veil between this world and otherworld, a time to honour and welcome ancestor spirits and protect from harmful spirits. There were rituals to be followed in those ancient times just as there were for my grandmother and her vigil with her ever-present Rosary, just as there are for each of us if we are willing.
And, I think there must have been private, hidden, silent words, soft thoughts and barely articulated feelings. Whatever the ritual then or centuries later, I think they said, thank you.
Thank you for the promise of the sun once we’ve made it through this long darkness, thank you for the promise of light and new life, thank you for this dark night to let our sadness out and watch it disappear into the dark, this thin veil to release the grief of the year past, the sorrow of unwanted goodbyes, the end of things we would have held closely.
Things change, and we need a holy place and time to make peace with the change. Our beings rest in ritual, relax in familiar prayers. We do well when we can set aside time and prepare a particular, separate space to give thanks for change, to allow, to rest without resistance as the seasons shift, as darkness and light circle in their long dance, and as the moon rises on this holy night.
