What is in Kelvin's Head?

All Souls

02/11/2015

All Souls Day is a rehearsal for my own funeral.

I realised this a few years ago when someone commented that the All Souls Requiem at St Mary’s seemed to be a particularly important time of the year and was appealing to more people than it used to. When I sat and thought about it, I realised that what I was doing each year in preparing for it was preparing for my own funeral and that at some level, part of what gives me life and energy at St Mary’s is building a community that would know exactly what to do if I dropped down dead.

Some people might think that rather morbid but it isn’t. I don’t think that much about death. Keeping All Souls is actually a way of helping ourselves let the dead be dead without fixating constantly about them. After last night’s Requiem for All Souls it simply felt to me that all was as it should be. Those whom we care for had been commended to God’s love, we had prayed alongside one another in our remembering and we had done so in the most beautiful way we could do.

There are many things about All Souls which touch me. One is the use of the Eucharistic prayer for Easter. That’s what we do whenever there’s a funeral that is a Eucharist too. When someone dies there’s a snatch of Easter Day about the proceedings. In the first light of Easter, glory broke from the tomb, after all.

Last night’s requiem was sublime. The simple tunes of Rutter’s Requiem taking us on a pastoral journey. We saw that death is real. We saw that grief is raw. And we knew that God is love. The music was incredible – the choir literally singing to raise the dead.

At least, that’s how it was for me.

The double Feast of All Saints and All Souls is one that always takes my mind abroad too. I was in Sweden for it one year, the year before I was ordained. My memory is of people going to the graveyards and lighting candles on the graves. A little of the first snow of winter had fallen and there was mist swirling around the graveyard trees as people wandered the quiet pathways thinking about those who had died.

I remember someone telling me that they always lit candles for their parents and then crossed the graveyard to light another one on the grave of Dag Hammarskjöld – All Saints and All Souls always mingle.

And then three years ago I was in America at this time of year.

It seems to me that Hallowe’en has suffered rather at lot in its return trip back across the Atlantic to these shores. It seems now to be an excuse for very poor fancy dress bought from cheap outfitters by people who want to get drunk looking like a pirate or Wonderwoman.

Rather more interesting in the US these days is the set of traditions that the Latino people bring to this time of year. Some of the solemnity that northern Europeans cultivate when thinking about the dead is challenged by those who want to celebrate their dead with an enormous party.

This is what this time of year looks like in one of the churches that I visited during my sabbatical – All Saints’ Church in Chicago – a place which knows how to party.

In the midst of life we are in death.

And vice versa.

23 responses to “What if this is the end of the Eucharist?”

Thomas Scott

06/05/2020

Just noticing here that DGD (of happy memory) seems to have left out of his catalogue of joyous, sad, perilous, and solemn occasions any instance of celebrating during a plague or pestilence. I’m not worried about the mass. The eucharist need not be celebrated as though it were a car battery, as if not offering it now would somehow allow the power to run down. It is not at risk, we are, which I think is your point. The questions asked are worth asking, of course.

Reply
Mo Nicholson

06/05/2020

Mo Nicholson. This is an intriguing discussion and what I would like to add to it is the observation that I have had to learn the hard way that participation in the Eucharist being made impossible in no way diminishes an individual’s ability to worship God or be in fellowship with other believers. I am barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Catholic church because allergies make this impossible for me. The pain induced by this has little to do with feeling separation from God, in fact nothing at all as I do not feel that. It comes from feeling excluded from the community, different sections if which regard it as desirable or tolerable that a member of the community should be excluded in this way. This experience has made me understand as never before that if we place prime value on liturgical celebrations, ir indeed anything else, above charity, compassion, welcome and inclusivity, in other words love, then we have become the sounding gong which St Paul warned against. If we truly believe that God is love, as I do, then it is obvious that it is love for one another which makes us true children of God our Father, and in light of this we could begin to look at these present challenging circumstances as simply an opportunity to love more, to reach out to one another in whatever way possible in the knowledge that this is what actually matters and always did. Only perhaps we were tempted to almost make a fetish of our rituals, sacraments and so on. And perhaps this can show us a better way more adapted to the world we are supposed to serve.

Reply
Lynsay Downs

06/05/2020

You and your conversation with Dave Roberts prompted me to write this. Does it resonate for you?

https://astonishing.community/2020/05/06/conversations-in-coronatide/

Reply
1. Kelvin
  
  06/05/2020
  
  Thanks Lynsay – yes, it does resonate with me very much.
  
  I’ve shared it on facebook. I think it is really helpful.
  
  Reply
Fr Keith

06/05/2020

Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece. With the Eucharist central to much of, at least Anglican/Episcopalian, worship in recent generations, we perhaps forget that the Church in these islands was, between the Reformation and the liturgical revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, sustained by Mattins and Evensong as the regular diet of worship on Sundays. I’m not advocating a return to such times, but there is, as you suggest, work to be done on non-Eucharistic worship (though not defining it as a negative). Thanks again.

Reply
Fenland Boy

07/05/2020

For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church.

Why are you concerned about lay Presidency?

Reply
Chuck

08/05/2020

May I say respectfully, lighten up. Many Anglicans/Episcopalians lived on the edges of civilization in the nascent U.S. and various elements of the British Empire. Priests to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to baptize were seldom seen, at most twice a year in many areas. (Bishops, only every several years.) The Church carried on in this manner decade after decade. If circumstances require, the Church will carry on again despite our profound sense of loss.

I should add, to those who grew up under threat or reality of war, persecution, oppression, famine, other disease, etc, the present difficulty is not unfamiliar in many respects.

Reply
Miriam MacCarthy

08/05/2020

Thank you! It is wonderful to read these serious, personal thoughts about the Eucharist. My feeling is that it has become celebrated to the point of boredom. Church, and what we do in it, is in danger of becoming simply a habit. It could just as well be crackerjack for a fast-asleep congregation. My heresy is that the direction Jesus gave is to “do this in remembrance of me”, and that means everything we eat at any time, whether alone or with others, in thanksgiving. If that is seriously done, it has vastly more meaning. It really gets ones attention and requires preparation. Would not become popular or usual, I predict!

Reply