Our Ofrenda
For the last few years, Halloween has been slowly moving up the list to become my favorite holiday. Not because I like really anything to do with the culture of horror movies and culture that dominate the festival, but because it gives everyone permission to be creative and imaginative. From adults who've been working on a costume for months to the kid that wants the simple cat costume from Walmart, We get to enjoy the relief and fun that comes with fewer rules, obligations, and expectations that typically come with Christmas and Thanksgiving. In a "normal" non-Covid year, this would also be the chance that more people get to see and say "hi" and "thank you" to your neighbors. Unfortunately, this year more of us will be distant again. Reports like this one from Signa show 73% of workers ages 18-22 report "sometimes or always feel alone." The cultural excuse to open your door and interact with your neighbors in the simple, generous act of giving away candy can be a very major gift indeed. It doesn't carry all the baggage of giving and receiving the other holidays bring.
Yes, I like Halloween for those reasons, but I love this season for a far more spiritual reason. I love it because it is another opportunity for us as people to, as I like to say, "make friends with death." It gives us a much-needed chance to integrate our griefs, fears, and losses into our stories instead of separating, compartmentalizing, and running from them.
Many of you already know that the origin of the word Halloween comes from the older observance of "All Hallows Eve," the day before All Saints Day, the Christian honoring of all the "saints" and loved ones who have passed away. In Latino and Hispanic traditions, this is known as "Dia De Los Muertos." The Celebration of Dia De Los Muertos has also grown in popularity in the US in the last few years! You can watch the Pixar movie "Coco" and decorate your house with sugar skulls from Target. The colors and style of the tradition are being woven into our American fabric.
When I was young, I never celebrated this holiday. Even though my mom is from Colombia, Where the observance is called "Dia De Los Santos," it is not as exuberant as the more well-known Mexican day of the dead. By the time I was a kid, my mom was not a practicing Catholic anymore, but beginning to attend a charismatic evangelical church. So it wasn't until I was much older that I became intrigued by the desire to make spaces for life and death in my year's rhythm. My awareness of a rhythm I felt on a gut and soul level and then started to see all over the ancient Hebrew Scriptures and early Christian writing and then in other myths and traditions of the world (like the Ma'nene I wrote about last month ). Then I saw the same patterns driving our natural world's forces and even into the concepts of theoretical physics and laws of thermodynamics! Death, resurrection, and adaptation were baked into the very nature of reality. For hundreds of years, the Christian tradition has held space for people to reflect on this truth and respond in prayer and worship. The practices of Lent and Advent and All Saints Day are the major observances. Still, it can even be found in the much more ordinary disciples of silence, centering prayer, and lamentation.
In the West, where we prize productivity above almost everything else ( except maybe individualism ), there is simply a terror of stopping and grieving. Christians are exceptionally skilled at avoiding this holy work by using misusing doctrines of heaven to blunt the grieving process. ("We should be happy because they're in Heaven now!") "What good could come from crying about it?" Can you hear the underlying bias toward productivity in this language? The "good" is in the crying, and the more you try to run from the fear, the bigger the monster grows! (Isn't this one of the basic rules of any scary movie?) The beautiful rule of all literary tragedies ( which is also the truth found in the cross of Christ ), which allows for the protagonist's transformation and healing, is this, "when remedy is exhausted, so is grief." In other words, when you stop running, you can finally move forward.
So this year at my house, we have made space for death. We put it in the hallway, where we pass by every day. We've printed pictures of our ancestors, elders, and children who have passed away but whose ghosts live with us every day. Bill and Lee Romig, Rolly Richert, Sanne McCarthy, and Liam Nacianceno Romig-Leavitt. This is an Ofrenda in the Mexican tradition. It is an altar for an offering and a place of communion. On the day of the dead, we'll bake a "pan de Muerto" (bread of death) and break it there to share with the spirits of our dear ones. The little shelves in our hallway will become a table, sort of like the table Jesus once set for his followers. A space for loss and love. An invitation to be broken open and vulnerable. The table where loneliness ends and remedy is exhausted.
