While traveling in Central America in early November one year, I saw groups of people picnicking in a cemetery, blankets spread around among the graves. Over open baskets of food, people laughed and talked. Our translator explained that it was Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, when those who have died are remembered. It seemed wholly outside my experience of death and grief. But was it?
Years later, in an Iowa cemetery, my mom pointed out headstones of great-great grandparents I’d never met. We mused about what their lives were like as immigrants from Norway. I asked Mom about an open area in the center. She said that was where church families picnicked in the summers when she was a child. In that holy space, the living and the dead are embraced together by God.
Rituals and remembering are sacred acts, tools we can use to talk about death with our children and among ourselves, too. Through it all, we are people of resurrection hope. God holds us all, through it all.
This message is excerpted from “For all the saints” by Lisa A. Smith in the November/December 2021 Gather magazine. Today is All Saints Day.
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