“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”
“I had not thought,” says Dante to Virgil, “that death had undone so many.” A passage and a scene from Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, he has pictured himself as contemplating the hordes of lost souls in the Vestibule of Hell as they run to and fro following this or that fad or fancy, souls who willed and then unwilled their will unable to commit to anything; unworthy even of Hell, it seems. It serves, perhaps, as a kind of metaphor for the age of distraction.
T.S. Eliot quotes that same line in his great poem about the ambiguities of modernity, The Wasteland. “I had not thought death had undone so many”, it is said, but in the context of contemplating “a crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge.” His comment is about the living as dead, the walking dead, as it were, in the “unreal city” of the modern world.
There is something wrong and not quite right with us. Yet precisely in the gloom and grey of November, we are awakened to the end of our humanity in the glorious vision of the Communion of Saints, “a multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of All Saints. We have an end with God and with one another, as a community united in and through the diversities of human personality, a community united in prayer and praise of God. But when we neglect that vision, we find ourselves very much in the company of the walking dead, “cast into outer darkness,” as our Gospel puts it so frighteningly this morning, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” and all because of our indifference and our hostility and our unreadiness; in short, our lack of commitment.
The contrasts between the communion of saints and grim realities of outer darkness could not be greater.
Darkness and light, life and death. Sometimes the boundary lines between these realities are thin and even permeable. Halloween marks a kind of transition naturally and spiritually. Quite apart from its commercialized versions in our culture and quite apart from the modern themes of trick-or-treat with the ambiguous message of either being beggars or being terrorists, there is something intriguing about its pagan origins and, even more importantly, in the way in which that has been redeemed, sanctified and transformed in the Christian understanding. In a way, it illustrates nicely Paul’s concept and bidding to us about “redeeming the time” (Eph. 5.15). To attend to this is our task and necessity. The word, Halloween, already suggests the change and transformation. It simply means the Eve of All Hallows, the eve of all saints, which suggests a far different sensibility about life than our fascinations with ourselves and our fears about things that go bump in the night.
The awareness of our mortality is one of those important ideas that play a major role in our thinking about what it means to be human. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, Enkidu lies dying and has a vision of the Sumerian afterworld. Not unlike the popular spectral decorations of Halloween in our culture, it is envisioned as dark and dusty, spooky, to be sure, guarded by strange creatures who represent the confused forms of the human and the animal – the true basis for all monsters and for all that is monstrous. His vision, too, conveys the powerful idea that death is the great leveler: kings and paupers, rich and poor are all the same. In this early literary work, too, there is the first mention of a book of the dead, and Belit-Sheri who records the names of all the dead. The awareness of death is something profoundly human and the idea of a book of the dead implies that the dead are not simply to be forgotten. Even in this early awareness of death, there is the implicit notion that we are more than mortal, more than death. Powerful and important ideas, indeed.
Our western Halloween customs culturally have pagan origins, to be sure, whether it is in the Celtic ‘Samhain’, the Nordic ‘winter’s night’, the Welsh ‘winter’s eve’ or the Anglo-Saxon ‘blood-month’ (signifying the killing of the pig to get through the winter as illustrated in the labours of the month for November in Medieval art), there is the recognition of a kind of transition from the seasons of light and life and harvest to the fearful approach of the threatening and sobering darkness of winter. The idea of a kind of celebration that mimics or seeks to placate the spirits lies behind some of the practices and customs that remain with us. At root, is the deep sense of the uncertainty of the world and our place in it, an awareness of death, and a kind of fearfulness.
“The days are evil,” St. Paul tells us, but for Christians the evil does not lie in the uncertainties of nature and the world but in us, in our hearts and actions. A marvelous kind of transformation takes place precisely because of a new view of our humanity in Jesus Christ, a new view of death, and a new view of the end or purpose of our humanity. It is found in God and in the Communion of Saints. Instead of the book of death, there is now, in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the idea of “the book of life.”
Death is swallowed up in victory. Our consciousness of death carries through to the overcoming of death in the power and the truth of God. Rather than huddling in fearful uncertainties in the face of the darkness of the world, there is “singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord,” and doing so in a company. The Feast of All Saints has its beginnings in the fourth century, exactly at the time of the clarification of the essentials of the faith. It is a creedal doctrine: the idea of our humanity as a community united in prayer and praise, the idea of eternity and our participation in the life of God himself. This changes everything.
In the tenth century, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, All Souls’, also became part of the Church’s liturgical life in association with All Saints’. The idea of glory embraces our common mortality. And while we, like Dante, may not think at first that “death has undone so many,” the view of the Christian Scriptures is that in the Communion of Saints there is an even greater “multitude that no man could number.” Such is the meaning of our redeemed humanity. More than we could count or name or remember.
But it requires a new kind of thinking and feeling. It counters the dreadful indifference of our souls to what God seeks for us. It counters the equally dreadful hostility of our indifferent souls to the messengers of God and to the institutions which exist to proclaim his Word and celebrate his Sacraments. It counters the deadly indifference of our unreadiness which is about nothing less than our failure to attend to what God seeks for us. Without that we are indeed the walking dead, caught in the distractions of our age and unaware of what is proclaimed before us. God invites us and what shall our response be? That is the challenge of this Gospel within the beautiful context of All Saints and All Souls.
The challenge is to want what God wants for us. “Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is,” St. Paul tells us. We discover the true worth and dignity of our humanity in communion with God.
“The wedding is ready, but they who were bidden were not worthy”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XX in the Octave of All Saints,
November 2nd, 2014