O Death, where is thy sting?

The other day my son came home from school, excited because that day his class had gotten to paint “sugar skulls.” Though I was already familiar with the custom, I asked him why they were painting these skulls: “For the Day of the Dead,” he said. “What is the Day of the Dead?” I asked him: “It’s the day when we can remember all our loving ones [sic] who have died and feel them close to us again.”

A child’s simplicity. The celebration of All Saints and All Souls, through the understanding of a five-year-old.

Our family lives in Berwyn, a suburb where the Latino population is abundant and thriving. "El Dia de los Muertos,” the Day of the Dead, is a Mexican cultural celebration which takes place each year from the Eve of All Saints (or All Hallows, i.e. Halloween) through All Souls’ Day. Though it focuses on our memories of those who have died, the focus is on joy and celebration—gifts are given, small holy places with trinkets and photos of the deceased are erected in homes, and images of skeletons and deaths-heads abound—in toys, in candy, in bread, in bright colors, in odd and paradoxical places.

To many of us from a Western European cultural background, this may seem inappropriate, almost morbid...but some years ago I spoke with some deeply faithful Mexican friends about this subject, and their answer was simple and profound: to make a piece of sugar candy or sweet bread in the shape of a skull and eat it, or to tell jokes and make silly toys out of the symbols of death, is to strip death of its power and mock its hold over us: “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?”

Which quote, of course, takes me directly to the Brahms German Requiem, in my opinion probably the single most glorious piece of choral music ever written, an exquisite melding of music and text and subliminal theology...I just adore it. The 6th movement starts out sort of tentatively and solemnly, and eventually bursts out into this glorious in-your-face challenge to death and hell--a grand and joyous explosion of excessive musical abundance crying out, "Tod! Tod! Wo ist dein Sieg?"...and then it dances off into a fugue that's at once merry and solemn, although a lot of conductors tend to skip the merry and take what is in my opinion a rather lugubrious approach to what I believe should be an extension of the wild cannot-be-denied-or-silenced joyful "giving of the (musical) bird" to all that we once feared and dreaded... a holy bacchanal, praising the God who strips even death of its strength, in which the participants become drunk not on bad tequila or cheap watery American beer but on the very essence of Life and its incredible joyous power...

Amazing music. St. Johannes, pray for us.

And while we're at it...St. Johann Sebastian, pray for us. St. Wolfgang Amadeus, pray for us. St. Thomas Stearns Eliot, pray for us. St. Joseph Bernadin, pray for us. St. Madeleine of Crosswicks, pray for us...

All holy men and women, pray for us.
peace,
Jennifer