Beginning with Friday, October 31st and running through (this year) Monday November 3rd, the church enters into the time of year called “Allhallowtide.” All Hallow’s Eve (known as Halloween) is the traditional Christian vigil for All Saint’s Day. All Saints is a solemnity, first promulgated by Pope Gregory IV in the 9th century, that celebrates the lives of all Christian saints, both known and unknown. The final day of the triduum is All Souls Day, a day set aside to remember all the faithful departed. Collectively, Allhallowtide serves as an annual time for the Church Militant to celebrate, contemplate, and remember the lives of all Christian saints, martyrs and faithful departed. While it is certainly meet and right for us to collectively remember the lives of God’s faithful who precede us in death, it also serves as a pragmatic spiritual discipline for the church.
Traditionally the church has taught the benefits of contemplating our own mortality. Within the halls of the monastery, there is a common refrain of “memento mori,” or “remember that you will die.” Our modern culture and society is full of distractions and seeks for us to focus on the immediate or dream of the future. It does not, however, want us to contemplate mortality, to contemplate our own frail and fraught nature. To do so steals momentum from the hectic pace of a consumerist culture. To a degree, this is a good thing for the modern godless man and woman, for to contemplate one’s mortality, one’s frail and fragile existence without Christ as your hope, is to invite nihilism and despair into life. But the Christian is called to consider their own mortality and to do so with Good News of Jesus Christ as your foundation and hope in the future. When done so from this perspective, it enables us to take stock of our lives; where we are succeeding, where we are deficient, where we should place more time and energy, and where we are being distracted from the life God has called us to. Indeed, as a Christian, contemplating one’s own mortality is the only way to live a full and sanctified life. In the end, death as the final curtain call of this earthly realm is most necessary for a full and righteous life.
And so we, as catholic Christians, observe Allhallowtide with reverence, respect, and emulation. We seek to accord our lives more fully to the righteous and sanctified lives of those saints, martyrs and faithful departed before us and we join with the whole body of Christ in remembering that one day we all will die. Recognizing this fact often, contemplating on this fact often, is the only way to live the righteous lives we are called to as God’s saints.
