Category: Spirituality

Pumpkin Season’s High Happy Day

How can we encounter eternity in daily human experiences?

Forever–is composed of Nows–

Emily Dickinson

The day is here. Halloween. The high happy day of Pumpkin Season!

I love Halloween in our neighborhood. My neighbors liven up their yards with orange and purple lights, pumpkins, and other fall decor. And when evening comes? Many people will be out and about, offering candy to trick-or-treaters and trick-or-treating with their children and grandchildren. In our neighborhood, Halloween has become a grand communal affair.

Today, if past experience is a predictor, just over 200 ghouls, ghosts, super heroes, and other characters will arrive in my neighborhood seeking Halloween treats. Many of the trick-or-treaters are children from nearby neighborhoods. Their parents seem to feel good about bringing their little ones to our community.

Sheila and I have fun sitting on our porch welcoming the treat seekers. The tiny goblins are adorable. We also look forward to seeing the imaginative costumes of the School of the Arts students who make their Halloween pilgrimages down our street.

More than meets the eye

But there is more to the high happy days of Pumpkin Season than meets the eye at sunset on October 31.

Halloween itself may be the most visible festival this time of the year, at least in my neighborhood. Perhaps less known is that Halloween is one of a trio of cultural and religious ritual observances that fall during the transitional days between October and November–All Hallow’s Even (or Evening), Hallowmas (All Saints Day), Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). The histories, beliefs and practices connected to each of these days vary depending on cultural and geographical location.

All Hallow’s Even and Hallowmas

All Saints Day dates to the early 7th Century and is observed on November 1 in many Christian traditions. All Saints Day commemorates those saints, now departed, who have influenced Christian faith. Many observances of All Saints Day, especially in Protestant churches, celebrate all Christians, past and present, who have died in the last year.

Some churches commemorate local “saints” on All Souls’ Day, the day following All Saints’ Day.

The historical name for All Saints was Hallowmas–“hallow” meaning “saints,” and “mas” meaning “mass,” or Eucharistic feast. Those who observed Hallowmas held a Eucharistic feast in memory of saints of the faith. The day before Hallowmas was (and still is in some places) the Vigil of All Hallows, or what is now recognized in popular culture as Halloween.

Dia de los Muertos

In some countries, for example in Portugal, Mexico, and Spain, All Saints coincides with Dia de los Inocentes (Day of the Innocents), which is the first day of the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). On the Dia de los Inocentes, communities remember infants and children who have died.

The Dia de los Muertos is observed in varied ways in Spanish-speaking countries, and at the center of many celebrations is time set aside to visit, and in some places decorate, the gravesites of loved ones who have died. The Dia de los Muertos is a national holiday in Mexico.

Encountering eternity in daily experiences

Emily Dickinson’s famous poetic line, “Forever—is composed of Nows–,” comes to mind for me as we arrive at these October/November days of remembrance.

Time, in Christian tradition and theology, has been defined, discussed, and debated over many centuries. The history of sacred and secular calendars reflects this liveliness of human understandings of time.

What Dickinson expresses in her poem reflects one dimension of this season’s trio of ritualized remembrances. Scholars think that in the poem that contains this line Dickinson wanted to emphasize how we can encounter eternity in daily human experiences.

What does this have to do with All Hallows, All Saints, and Dia de los Muertos? Perhaps the poem and these remembrances suggest that the saints are, in a sense, with us today. And we who are alive to remember them are living eternity now.

So, on October 31–Halloween to some, All Hallow’s Eve to others–we enter into a time of remembrance. In my neighborhood, we take to the streets after sunset, laughing and talking as our flashlights dance at our feet. One of my neighbors builds a fire in a fire pit in her driveway, and people stop by to visit and warm their hands.

This year, I am imagining our neighborhood Halloween sharing as a small foretaste of God’s reign. For a few hours, we will be community together, and that “now” will become a part of an anticipated “forever” where all people are free to laugh and play together.

As I write this on Halloween Eve, I lift a prayer: Holy Spirit, dance in our midst in these autumn days and inspire us again toward creating and being your Beloved Community in our cities, towns, and neighborhoods.

Giving Thanks for Neriah People

They embodied faith and courage when they decided to call a woman as their pastor all of those years ago.

In May of my 26th year, I headed for the Virginia hills with high hopes for my first pastorate. The year was 1988, and the church was Neriah Baptist.

Neriah has an intriguing name. The word “Neriah” is in the Old Testament and is the name of Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch’s father. Neriah means “God is light.”

Neriah Baptist Church was full of God’s light.

Annie Dillard describes churches where members haul in from their gardens each Sunday flower arrangements the size of hedges. Those were Neriah people. Larger than life spirituality. Earth-connected faith. Neriah people—they were truck drivers, teachers, sheep farmers, principals, gardeners, artists, inventors, and determined huggers. And they were people of deep faith.

Now, becoming a pastor is by itself culture shock for someone only a few months out from her last theology exam. And for a town dweller who had never seen a sheep farm and who was a best a reluctant hugger? My education to be a pastor was far from finished.

My Master of Divinity degree prepared me for much of my pastoral work. I could exegete a Biblical text. My mind was alive with theological ideas. But no seminary professor reflected theologically with me about praying for calves in hayfields–something I did in my initial weeks at the church. And giving two sermons in a homiletics course is nothing like preaching every week. Sunday comes. Pastors preach. Then in seven days Sunday arrives, then in seven more days…

So, in the unexpected 4th year of my MDiv when I was called to be a pastor? I learned that Neriah people longed to hear a Gospel word every Sunday. I also learned that the hospital was 60 miles away and that driving to and from the emergency room in the night’s wee hours was wearying and that there were meetings and phone calls and pastoral visits and that all of this left little time or energy for a whole lot of things I thought would be my Gospel work.

What I now know and believe is this: all of it, baptizing and breaking bread at the table, blessing a child moments after she comes screaming into this old world, picking green beans with a church member while he cries and cries because his wife has been diagnosed with cancer—all of it, the grand pastoral actions and the ones that seem mundane. All of it is, well, liturgy.

Liturgy. Cathedrals come to mind. And communal prayer. And Gospel choirs. Liturgy is worship.

And in the ancient Greek city-states of 2500 years ago where the word was birthed, liturgy or leitougia meant “work of the people.” Liturgy in that context was work people did at their own expense for the public good—anything from street cleaning to bridge-building.

I wonder. What happens when we put the two meanings together? Liturgy is the work of the people to praise God; liturgy is also the work of the people to join God in God’s everyday work to care for and transform the world.

Neriah people taught me to embrace all of the meanings of liturgy. They taught me to get the dirt of creation underneath my fingernails, and in doing so, they instilled pastoral wisdom in me: the things we do again and again each day because we must? These things are liturgy, and God dwells in them and in us as we take up our everyday callings one moment, one step, one action at a time.

Neriah people taught me about bold works of justice-making when against all financial odds we opened a food pantry for people in our community. Neriah people taught me how to pray at hospital bedsides and offer blessings at dinners on the ground. Neriah people taught me to be a pastor.

I think about my Neriah years and Neriah people almost every day, and I thank God for their persistent faith and their generosity in sharing that faith and their wisdom with me all of those years ago. They embodied courage when they decided to call a woman as their pastor no matter what criticism might come their way as a result. I celebrate that I was the woman they called and that I had the opportunity to live out and deepen my calling to preach while working and worshiping with them.

My prayer for these days? I pray that we may all know the mercy and grace of Neriah–God is light–in our lives as we continue to work together to share Gospel justice, hope and love in our broken world. May we find the courage and faith to be Neriah people