This is the season that we remember we must die. Through the ages, this reminder was meant to spur on a desire to do good before it is too late, a desire to make a positive mark on our world, to promulgate virtue, to reach out for the happiness our God allows and for which He has built us.
But in the past few years I have found that death seems to surround us in ways we might never have expected. It fascinates us as a society. On the one hand, we “rage against the dying of the light,” but on the other hand, we live amid a “culture of death.” We see horrendously violent video games and movies with bloodletting extravaganzas and perversions of mind and heart. At the same time, our society condones the elimination of the elderly and sick through assisted suicide and the unborn through abortion.
In popular culture, death has morphed into a kind of wicked obsession with blood and carnage – the more abhorrent the better. But these created horrors mask the reality of death among us, such as the tragedy of the pandemic or abortion.
Of course, these fantasies are at a fever pitch this time of year. Halloween itself is the Christianization of old pagan rituals. For many years, Celts celebrated Nov. 1 as their new year, believing that on the eve of the new year the distinction between the living and the dead was blurred, and ghosts freely roamed the villages and hillsides. Celtic priests, or Druids, built bonfires where people could burn sacrifices. They dressed up in costume, usually the heads and skins of animals. With the Romans these rituals took on different characteristics and honored various deities, such as Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees. And so, centuries later, bobbing for apples became part of Halloween night. In 835 Pope Gregory IV formally switched All Hallows Day (All Saints Day), a day to honor all the saints, to Nov. 1.
These days it’s difficult to find a wholesome expression of what death is and how we may look upon it. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), a long-time journalist who served in British intelligence in World War II and who converted late in life to Catholicism, took on contemporary culture’s distorted view of death in his autobiographical “Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim.” For much of his life Muggeridge was an atheist, but he slowly came to perceive the presence of God in his life. “Somehow or another,” he said, “we belong to a larger scene than our earthly life provides.” He was greatly influenced by people he came to know, such as Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was impressed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s take on death when, facing Nazi soldiers who were getting ready to cart him off to his execution, said, “For you it is an end, for me a beginning.” Muggeridge, who was 84 when he wrote his “Confessions,” noted, “Now, death seems more alluring than ever, when, in the nature of things, it must come soon, and transmits intimations of its imminence by the aches and pains and breathlessness which accompany old age.”
He came to see, in the Christian economy, not the remnants of pagan sacrifice nor the images of butchery on the modern screen, but rather the gratitude that comes in believing that more awaits us as our earthly bodies fade.
“Indeed, sanely regarded,” he said, “death may be seen as an important factor in making life tolerable; I like very much the answer given by an octogenarian when asked how he accounted for his longevity – ‘Oh, just bad luck!’ No doubt for this reason among others, death has often in the past been celebrated rather than abhorred.” He then quotes the metaphysical poet John Donne, whom he calls the “very laureate of death,” who said, “Sleep, even just for a night, wonderfully refreshes us; how much more, then, will sleeping on into eternity be refreshing!” Then Muggeridge refers us to Donne’s famous lines of poetry:
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
“And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
Indeed, the Christian message is that death has died with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The soul is immortal, and we experience our humanity on a deeper level when we face the separation from a loved one as the body returns to dust.
Of course, great literature can emerge from depictions of the human heart encountering that separation.
Leo Tolstoy’s famed novella, “The Death of Ivan Illyich,” is a very human exploration of the nuances surrounding the imminent death of a respected citizen. It examines the tragedy of life lived in the shallows of routine and greed and a preoccupation with the material, to the exclusion of spirituality. At his wake, Ivan Illyich’s so-called friends make sure they will not miss their regular card game later that night. Tolstoy knew that to regret the life one has lived is perhaps one of life’s greatest tragedies.
The American author James Agee won a posthumous Pulitzer prize for his novel “A Death in the Family.” In the autobiographical story, a man is called away after his father suffers a heart attack. On the way home from visiting his sick father, he is killed in a car wreck – something that really happened to the author’s father when Agee was 6 years old. In achingly poetic prose, he describes lost connections, the effects of grief and heartbreaking loss.
Ultimately, when an artist attempts to depict the compositions of the heart reaching out beyond this life, he or she is approaching the Catholic notion of the communion of saints. The Celts considered the line between life and death blurred one day a year. The communion of saints gives us entranceway every day to the realm of those who have passed before us. Once we have reconnected, once we have embraced this communion, all the other canvases of death and dying, gruesome or otherwise, give way to this gem of our sacred religious sensibilities.
Yes, we talk to the dead – nothing Halloween-ish about it. Our relationships with those in purgatory and heaven are real. Spiritually, we feel their breath upon our cheeks. No spectacle for scary movies, only the loving reality of life continued, the place in the heart where “memento mori” becomes a fortifying assurance and All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day become exquisite family reunions.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.