All Saints Day, . . . A Sacred Spin on the Dead

"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?'"         -The Gospel of John 11:25,26

On this Eve of a Hallowed Day 2015, I thought I'd post something on how Nov. 1st, All Saints Day, has become one of my favorite days of the year:

I took the call to Vancouver in large part because of the memory of my late maternal grandparents who meant so much to me in life and are buried nearby in the Bellevue/Seattle area. After spending nearly a decade serving in Haiti among a very superstitious people, being raised in a Taiwanese culture, itself with much involvement with the occult and being somewhat familiar with the Chinese notion of "luck," I look back on my last 25 years as a follower of Christ, and I am deeply grateful that Christ has conquered the grave, and that because of His triumph for His Church Universal, we view death in an entirely different way from the rest of the world. Is death an intruder? Yes. Does it tear at the fabric of human relationships bound together in love and covenant? Yes. Did Jesus weep with a loud shriek of anger and pain standing before his friend Lazurus' tomb? Yes. But is death the great unknown like the Lord Voldemort, the one who must not be named? No. When Tanya and I were looking at one particular rental situation here in Vancouver, a Chinese family turned us down, the reasoning being this: Mike is a pastor, pastors conduct funerals that involve dead people; ergo, we do not want him living in our house for fear of evil spirits coming with him. I chuckle, and I grieve, for so many people live in this way fearing what is considered to be the great unknown; however, for those who know Jesus, we have a different kind of hope and formulate things differently.

In working on my dissertation, I came across this wonderful piece of reading from Philip Sheldrake's Spaces for the Sacred. Sheldrake speaks of how Christianity produced a "reversal of traditional beliefs and practices about death and burial" in the Roman Empire. A new equation emerged:

Cemeteries were sacred from the earliest times. Holy men and women eventually died. Thus it was their burial places, along with those of Apostles and martyrs, which became the most visible monuments of this changed understanding of the sacred as located in people. It was important that the holy dead should continue to exercise their drawing power in the midst of the living. Because a theology of resurrection altered the meaning of death to point onwards to another form of existence, dead people had a special role in Christianity by joining two worlds together. Their tombs were privileged places where contrasting worlds could meet.

The traditional practice in the pre-Christian Roman Empire was to relegate cemeteries outside the walls of cities. But by the end of the sixth century, the tombs of saints were becoming centres of public Church life. There was a kind of theology of real presence that suggested an equation: the saints are 'with God'; the saints continue to be with us; ergo they are mediators in our midst of the presence of divine power– a kind of 'taster' of what was on offer in the other world. This produced a reversal of traditional beliefs and practices about death and burial and was one of the most powerful symbols of the encroachment of a specifically Christian culture into the mainstream of the late Empire. The dead were no longer rigidly excluded from the public life of the city of the living. From the start of its public existence, Christianity engineered a massive and subversive transgression of important boundaries. Spaces for the Sacred, p. 48