The Theme ... All Saints' Day - 1

The Roman Catholic Tradition of honoring the dead underscores the paradox of earthly existence and the needs of communicate with the mysterious parts of being. The theme confirms the universal longing for the ultimate knowledge. It subverts the science that governs the mind, for it announces that we live in order to die and die in order to live. Millions who follow the light of the belief continue to rely on its promised benevolence. We honor the dear because we want to be honored when we die. The ritual materials with which we manifest our belief – flowers, candles, prayers, vigils, meditations – strengthen our resolved and fortify our spirit, so that we vanquish without complaints the hardship attendant to the c celebration. We sweat through heavy traffic and under the noonday heat, we bear the din and the foulness of the marketplace into which the cemetery has been turned, we suffer the blast of radios and vocal chords that fracture the essence of our prayer, but these are insignificant when considered against the magnitude of hope that their toleration gives us.

For tolerance of pain is a desirable form of salutary martyrdom. It is loss with the promise of gain, or pain to be washed away by pleasure, of something emerging from nothing. But first there must be the realization of things as they are, rhapsodized by Wordsworth thus: “The rainbow comes and goes,/ And lovely is the rose;/ The Moon doth with delight/ Look round her when the heavens are bare;/ The sunshine is the glorious birth;/ But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth’- before the vision comes of things as they will be: “Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendor in the grass of glory in the flower;/ We will grieve not, rather find/ Strength in what remains behind.” In the theology of hope, every suffering accepted is a digit toward the required sum for salvation, for “God doth not need/ Either man’s work of His own gifts: who best/ Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best.”