Oiche Shamhna / All Saints and All Souls
Oiche Shamhna / All Saints and All Souls
(20 years ago Fr Colm Kilcoyne, from Castlebar, wrote this article for The Sunday Tribune on the theme of Halloween and its connection to the Christian Feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Colm himself died on October 15th last. R.I.P.)
Four thousand years ago, our Celtic ancestors built Newgrange. It was “a house of eternity” for their royal dead. On the shortest day of the year, December 21st, a ray of sunlight travels the length of the passage, from a roof box above the door. For 17 minutes the chamber has light. Then, darkness. Not for another 12 months will sunlight warm the spirits of the dead in the depths of Newgrange.
In 1926, Howard Carter, the archaeologist, was working in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. He broke through to the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Inside the coffin he found the body of the king. On the forehead was a tiny garland of flowers, still coloured after 3,000 years. Pharaoh’s young widow had put them there, as a gesture of belief in the afterlife. The year was 1342 BC.
This weekend always reminds me of the room in Newgrange, and the flowers on a pharaoh’s forehead. November 2nd is the Feast of All Souls. On that night, the veil between life and beyond was drawn back and the dead mingled with the living. Normality was suspended. We could converse with our dead.
In time, ease with the dead degenerated into fear of them and we filled the night with games to cover our fright. Halloween. The church reclaimed the night and created All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. The Christians began to bury their dead in separate graves, not in huge mounds, to show that each life has a destiny. Over the graves they placed Celtic crosses. The perspective changed. With the Celtic cross, the circle connecting the arms was there all day every day. Carved in stone. Signs of eternity.
I love this season. It is Celtic. Half superstition, half Christian. Who knows which is which? Who cares? These are the days that feed the soul and imagination. They touch on the biggest question of all. What next? St. Paul gives the makings of an answer. He said we are people who live in a tent, until such time as we live in our real home. The tent we pitch where our heart and our ambitions and loves lead us. At some point, though, we fold the tent and take up residence in a home prepared for us by God. A place where the sun shines every day, where flowers don’t whither, where the birds of the air are known by name and the cross evaporates into the circle of God’s eternal love.
Fr. Colm Kilcoyne R.I.P.
