Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials in a year than Americans attend in a lifetime. The first one or two thousand years of the church for most of the world could not ignore death, and so this weekend in the church's calendar is a time to "memento mori", remember death, in All Hallow's Eve (Halloween), All Hallow's (Saint's) Day, and All Soul's Day. I suspect the timing was set in the Northern Hemisphere by Fall, the season of fading light and dropping leaves. In 2025, we are once again in Fall, and once more face-to-face with death.
A stage IV metastatic cancer dispels the illusion of living indefinitely. And yet the treatment gives a potentially substantial stretch of road ahead, suffering from the hard medicines and costly commitment but walking on through beauty and joy too. Which is true of life always, just more obvious for us. In my Wendell Berry novel last night I read the main character (Jayber Crow) describe his life as "hoping for good, reconciled to the bad, welcoming the little unexpected happiness that came." Amen.
The depth of this holiday stretch is the communal nature of the recognition. We are part of a cloud of witnesses (Heb 12), a long parade of saints through time, whose lives upon this earth we recognize and celebrate. We are not alone, even in, maybe especially in, our hardest times. We recognize our belonging, and we garner the wisdom of people who have followed this path through the ages. No trick-or-treaters came to our door last night (so we had to eat a snickers ourself) but three different neighbors / church friends stopped us as we walked down our road yesterday to greet and chat. We miss living intimately with family, team, and village life. But we are not alone even now.
Suffering and death, per 1 Corinthians 15, are also "thin spaces" between the seen and unseen world. As such, they are opportunities to recognise the "supernatural", the forces that we relegate to fantasy or horror movies but actually experience in our lives. Suffering is the path, and death is the doorway, and both get our attention when we are distracted by sex, money, power, and all the palpable principalities of this world. They realign our grasp of what matters.
And lastly, both suffering and death have been redeemed. Death was our final enemy, but Jesus' resurrection turned it into a calling home. I love the old hymns in our country church that compare dying to being called in for supper. Perhaps the best seasonal Halloween passage is Ezekiel 37, where dry bones scattered across the wilderness are breathed to rattle to life. Love is stronger than death.
The Fall foliage carries all these themes of death. Each leaf is an individual work of art, and a splash of color in the branch, the tree, the forest of seasonal unity. The crisp forest of color takes us into the edge of another world. And the dying leaves blaze glory, redeeming finitude into victory.
True confessions, Bone stories like Ezekiel and Halloween resonate for another reason: I (Jennifer) broke my left arm in October (after breaking my right arm in July). This time the crushed pieces and joint impaction meant surgery, which our hero ortho surgeon son arranged, so we diverted to Colorado between visits with moms. Cancer, loss of home/normal/work/community, injuries in the family, violence in Tanzania and Uganda this weekend and Congo most days, conflicts between people we care for, loneliness and disability in aging moms, a lot of bad to plod through this year.
So this holiday weekend we lean into the grace that pulls bones back together, that gives camaraderie along the strenuous road, that connects us to saints living and dead in the human family that will one day reune at home.
