And today is All Souls Day

The three part celebrations conclude today. They started with Halloween.  No matter what it's actual origins, Halloween is a time to acknowledge the supernatural and the hellish.  A reminder that not only do we return to ashes, but there is, for many non-Modernists, a chance to go to furnaces as well.

Yesterday countered that, a celebration of saints.  For Catholics, saints are simply those individuals upon whom the Church puts its seal of approval.  These are people the Church says 'by everything we believe, that person is now in the presence of the Holy One.'  There could very well be zillions more, it's just that the ones called Saint are recognized by the Church to have done what is evidence of heavenly existence.  A reminder that for all the powers of darkness and hell, God's grace is available, and greater.

Today is All Souls.  Fittingly, it's the day we remember the ones who have gone before.  Like my family members, my Dad, anyone I know and love.  We remember them and pray for them.  For in the Catholic tradition, the idea of Purgatory exists more explicitly than anywhere else.  Almost all Christian traditions acknowledge that between our sinful selves and our standing before the Holy One for eternity, we must be somehow made holy.  See Isaiah's vision of God's throne room for a good example.

Still, Catholics - as Catholics do - unpack and expand that to a full blown doctrinal reality.  Complete times and ways to avoid it, prayers are given for those who die because it's assumed most people must spend a bit of time there, and an unpleasant time it is.  So today is a day we focus on that.  Like all Saint or Holy days, it's assumed that devout Catholics do anyway throughout the year.   Just as we'd like to think that Americans are patriotic on more days than July 4, or that consumers spend money frivolously on more days than the shopping days before Christmas.

Still, like the other celebrations, this is a day to zero in that focus and think especially on them.  So Dad, I'm thinking of you and praying for you.  To be brutally honest, purgatory is one of those Catholic distinctives I'm sort of 'meh' over.  The Church says it, I acknowledge that most believe something happens, but no matter what, I pray for you.  Pray that you are in the presence of God, pray that if there is any purging needed, it will be a fast purge, and pray that you are blessed and can stand before God and lift your prayers and petitions on our behalf, and do so soon.

Including our youngest (not pictured here because he wasn't born yet), we miss you.