All Souls

Carl Seaburg wrote that  "All Souls Day is set apart for the commemoration of those `holy souls' who have graced our lives and passed from our living circle. Their radiance, their works, their memories, are still with us and on this day we meet to celebrate them fondly. And thoughtfully too, remembering that we also some day shall follow where they went.

Today the 2nd of November is the feast of All Souls. A time in the Christian Calendar to remember all souls who have departed this life. It follows All Hallows Eve or Halloween on the 31st of October and All Hallows or All Saints Day on 1st of November.

Like other Christian festivals, including Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide, these three autumn days are a fascinating mixture of pre-Christian, Christian and even post-Christian tradition and mythos. I am fairly certain that the children going door at Halloween are probably not aware that they have created a modern day variant on the pre-Christian festival of Samhain; a festival that not only celebrated harvest, but was also a time to commune with spirits of ancestors. There are similar traditions throughout most culture's, autumnal and winter festivals. Autumn is a time of reflection, a time to take stock before the harsh realities of winter come.

All Souls has grown in meaning for me as the years have passed. This year I have lost my last grandparent and I also lost my first sibling, our Allen, I have also lost several dear friends too. I know I am not alone in my grief, although sometime it can feel this way. Perhaps the most painful loss of my life, thus far, occurred on All Souls Day 2006, when Ethan was killed. He was the soul that first reignited my life when the lights had gone out. He was the spark that rekindled the light in me…whenever I think of the following words by Albert Schweitzer it is his face I see and his soul I feel “ At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lit the flame within us”

Ethan’s beautiful soul helped me discover my own soul and to once again connect to the eternal and universal soul that holds all life.

May Sarton beautifully and I would say perfectly captured the meaning of "All Souls" in the following poem.

All Souls' by May Sarton

Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend,

The cold bleak voices of the early morning 

When all the birds are dumb in dark November - 

Remember and forget, forget, remember.

After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living,
Through the pale, sunlight once more gravely speak,
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
"Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be unravelled, nor the gift ungiven"

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,

Mother and child, lover and lover mated,

Are wound and bound together and enflowing.

What has been plaited cannot be unplaited -

Only the strands grow richer with each loss

And memory makes kings and queens of us.

Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven, 

We who find shelter in the warmth within,

Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend

Our complex love, our mourning without end

I first came across the poem just a few weeks before the first anniversary of Ethan’s death. A tree was being planted in memory of him at his school and I had been asked to offer some words of prayer. I decided to offer May's poem. It is the lines below that really strike me deep in the core of my being, in the marrow of my soul.

Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
"Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven."

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited -
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel now new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.

Some things cannot be unravelled they are with us forever and nor should they be. The gift of love is priceless and once given is a part of our soul forever. It survives death. It can never be destroyed.

Now what happens to us after our physical lives have ended is impossible to say with certainty. I suppose that has to be a matter of faith. A conclusion for all of us to draw ourselves. One thing I feel safe in claiming though is that it cannot be any stranger than this life. While they say that death is the great mystery in many ways I think that life itself is an even greater one…this is why each day I sing the joy of living in all its mystery.

I have a deep affection for the writing of John O'Donohue. a soul no longer physically with us but who to this day touches so many lives. He caught the spirit of "All Souls" near perfectly in what follows...

"When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under the burden and control of space and time. The soul is free; distance and separation hinder it no more. The dead are our nearest neighbors; they are all around us. Meister Eckhart was once asked, Where does the soul of a person go when the person dies? He said, no place. Where else would the soul be going? Where else is the eternal world? It can be nowhere other than here. We have falsely spatialized the eternal world. We have driven the eternal out into some kind of distant galaxy. Yet the eternal world does not seem to be a place but rather a different state of being. The soul of the person goes no place because there is no place else to go. This suggests that the dead are here with us, in the air that we are moving through all the time. The only difference between us and the dead is that they are now in an invisible form. You cannot see them with the human eye. But you can sense the presence of those you love who have died. With the refinement of your soul, you can sense them. You feel that they are near."

This speaks deeply to me and brings to mind the following poem “To Music” by Rainer Maria Rilke,

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings.
You language where all language ends.
You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? –: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,–
holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable.

“…as the other side of the air…” Really hits that place deep in the marrow of my soul.

When I think of those we have loved but who are no longer physically with us it seems to me that they have not gone elsewhere but are still bound up with us, their love is tied up in our hearts and souls in a different way and they inhabit that other place at “other side of the air”…but we can know and feel their presence when we remember them, especially when we gather together with others who remember them too. In moments such as these their souls touch our souls once again. “What has been plaited, cannot be unplaited”. We can sometimes feel their presence…The more sensitive souls amongst perhaps more so.

Those we have loved and lost live on in our dreams and memories. Such memories do indeed makes kings and queens of us. Their souls are woven into our souls, they impact on our daily actions and our waking thoughts and feelings. The love that we shared never dies. Yes their death changes our relationship with them, but the love we shared lives on. The love has created a bond that cannot be broken “what has been plaited cannot be un-plaited”. This love is an eternal force that cannot be taken from us. Its influence will continue to impact upon us until our dying day and even beyond as it impacts on the lives that we touch, lives which our loved ones will never have physically known. We are all bound together in a rich tapestry of love. Those who came before us, those whose lives touch us and whose lives we touch and those who live beyond our time and space live on. This love is eternal it never dies.

Today we remember all the souls who have touched our souls and who have shown us the way, who have revealed the love that is God. Let us also think of the lives that have been touched by these souls who they never physically knew.

Let us remember let us offer thanks and praise for those souls who are no longer physically with us but whose love will never leave us. "Love I swear it, is immortal."

"...the ghosts are part of us..."

I'm going to end this little blogspot with another piece from a writer who has inspired me and countless others greatly. A beautiful soul who is no longer Physically with us. It is titled "Meditation on All Souls" by Elizabeth Tarbox

"Who are my people, where are you who birthed me to play in summer's circle? I think I see you out of the corner of my eye, gone before I can look again, working, talking, engaged, and alive.

My ancestors are all about me in the ragged edges of memory, like partially developed film; the details are sketchy now. No princes and ladies among them, but scullery maids and journeymen. I know their faces, but not their voices, not the way their clothes smell, not the soft hands warm and red from a day of washing sheets. did they smile at me? Did they notice the little gifts I bought? I don't remember.

Bits and pieces of my people remain in memory's attic, hardly enough to make a tribe. forebears in small brick cottages with sooty chimneys and outdoor toilets. Women with wrap-around aprons and men with cloth caps. Brown teapots and doilies and unheated bedrooms. My grandmother's slippers, my mother's bone-handled hairbrush. Just memories, without the power to haunt.

So I seek a new tribe, other meanings. the little girl at the shelter shows me a toy, her creased fingers cannot yet turn a key, but there is still strength in her hand as it touches mine. Though she doesn't know my name, she would come with me if I would make her toy work and protect her from a world that has roughed her skin, bruised her heart, and given her only broken toys. She is a needy child; therefore is she not my child?

The old man who hardly knows me says he loves me because I bring him a bowl of food and sit there while he eats it. He is a hungry old man; therefore is he not my father?

At home I listen to a tape of sacred music and I weep in my chair and I cannot say if I weep for the child in the shelter or for the child I used to be. The spirits have no power to haunt , I claim, so why do I weep in nostalgia and regret my forgetfulness?

I look at the faces around a meeting table, across the sanctuary, in the candlelight of a meditation group, and I think, these are my people now, we belong to each other, I pour out my soul in trust to a new tribe. These are my people, who touch my hands, who invite me to come along, who make room for me to sit in the shadow of the candlelight and listen to their songs."