Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight – William Penn.
Now we begin the darkening dance into the half of the year which is gilded with shadow.
Underlying every relationship – those with our families, those with our friends, those with our enemies, and all those whose potential remains in the yet-to-be – is a future in which we have parted ways – by word, by chronos, by kairos, by circumstance and if all those fail- universally by death. Not a single pairing will avoid this outcome. October and November in the liturgical calendar face us with the contrast of death and our passing into the light beyond the shadow.
The people you love, those you reject or have rejected you and those with whom a relationship is out of reach, will be no more or at least as we knew them (or did not know them).
All human love, I’ve noted elsewhere, is a metaphor for Divine Love, all human union a metaphor for Divine union, and it follows that all separation, all parting, all chasms of time, conversation or feeling, a further means to understand our relationship to the Divine.
To be sure, not all partings are sorrow, and there are many where, parted by human elements, are joyous and we are eager that time in which we may again, be in the company of those we love. This too helps us to understand our relationship to the Divine, and I’d wager, to ourselves as well- for whose company are we more transient with but ourselves, whose company are we at times the most grateful to come home to, or depart from, than our own.
The reasons and feelings behind the our coming together, and coming apart provide insight into that relationship which is the closest to our being, and furthest away from our grasp – that of the Divine itself. it is no accident that one of the theologies by which we apprehend God (at least insofar as human language allows) is the idea that God is both transcendent and immanent.
Death is the ultimate distance, our last parting and finality between us, yet is no barrier to God. Residing in eternity, that relationship transcends all notion of time, all notion of irretrievability, all notion of finality- placed as it is outside of time or space.
As we will wind our way towards the end of October, we will enter that season of spiritual time which we call Hallowtide – the triduum of All Saints’ Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day which liminally sits astride the end of October and beginning of November. It is the time when as our spiritual ancestors have noted that the veil which separates this realm from the beyond is the thinnest, and the time where we recall those from whom we have been parted by death.
In this coming season we have an opportunity for practice, for the expanse of both sight and horizon, to not only recall those we have loved and lost by way of death, but also our relationships to those who remain, and to ourselves. What relationships have passed into a kind of beyond, whose presence we can sense but not touch, what part of ourselves have done this, for whom or what was parting a blessing, for whom or what was parting a deep hurt, for whom or what was parting is seemingly an endless loss – and where might we connect to that whom or that what, where might we want to embrace a finality.
Liturgical and spiritual seasons exist to remind us of movements and tides in the life of a spiritual seeker, they are there to call us to attention when the world wishes to hammer out a now now now. But all veils are just that, veils and not walls, veils and not barriers, veils and not mere windows – they can be parted at any time.
Hallowtide is chiefly about death, but anything that is about death is implicitly also about the living. Stretch your gaze and hands across the veil of your partings, go beyond the limit of your sight, and see who and what lives in you. If nothing else, it will charge with meaning and depth that time to come, when like so many before us, so many around us and so many after us, we will light the candles, we will whisper names known and unknown, and intone that most ancient of formulas – requiem aeternam dona eis domine – Eternal Rest, grant them O Lord.
Ad Sacram Flammam
+ Shaun Mar Iohannes
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