Companions of the Sacred Flame,
The darkening of the year in our seasonal calendar in the Northern Hemisphere is matched in part by our liturgical calendar – where it ascends and descends with a crescendo peak when we hit the Triduum of Hallowtide – All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, All Saints and All Souls.
The veil is at its thinnest in this liminal space between October and November, as tradition and liturgy alike underline. As our eyes fix on the diaphanous now into the beyond, the November calendar, after the din of spirit, moves into the still space of translucent memory.
November, often dressed in Alberta with snow and sharp cold breeze, is a liturgical and spiritual afterimage of the embers of our spiritual encounter with those who passed outside of time. Liturgically, we have the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours, also known as Old Halloween, and of course, Remembrance Day and All Gnostic Saints – each of which carry the echos of meaning, memorial and memory.
When we lose someone that we love, our relationship with them doesn’t end, it only changes. And all meaningful relationships, including those where one is in the here and now and the other is in Eternity, require attention, care and maintenance.
That the conversation appears to be a one-sided endeavour from the perspective of outsiders, matters not. It is yet a relationship, dialogue and exchange – we speak to those we have lost through our experiences, our hopes, our fears, the language of our laughter and the myriad symbols of our silences and tears – and they speak back to us through moments of memory, the cycles of nature and in the conversations, presence and eyes of those who also knew and loved them as well.
Each part of this ongoing dialogue deepens our relationship with those we have lost, not only in the present as we travel to the future – but also enriches and enlivens our past.
This isn’t just some poetic framing of one of the most difficult realities of human life, it is also a fact of the brain and mind.
Each time we recall a memory, we not only recall that specific time or event, we also implicitly recall the last time we remembered it, and these are bound up together. Thus – the now continues to affect and change the past – every time we recall a memory, we alter it with some piece of the present. How are we tending this field of relationship, memory and love?
Further, each recall does not only deepen and enrich our memory and remembrance with those who have gone before – it also deepens and changes our relationship to ourselves.
So much of our spiritual practice involves being at peace with the present and and planting seeds against the uncertainty of the future – but there remains behind us, and all around us a ‘village of presence’ as the late poet, philosopher and priest John O Donohue says in his ‘On passing a Graveyard’.
“May we reverence the village of presence
In the stillness of this silent field”
This village speaks to us through a thousand angles of encounter, and we speak back to them with all of our now and the now-to-comes.
May your spiritual journey through the month of November be a transformative conversation and dialogue both with yourself and “those who have existed, who are no more but who live anew, alive and resplendent.”
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