By Sarabeth Goodwin
St. Stephen and the Incarnation’s Misa Alegría congregation was just six months old when I suggested we might celebrate Día de los Muertos – the Day of the Dead – as a way to invite our English-speaking brothers and sisters to join us around the table. After all, most North Americans have some inkling of this strange and colorful holiday that is the Mexican commemoration of All Souls’ Day. My excitement waned when the proposal was greeted by silence from my mostly Central American congregation. Finally one person ventured, “Madre, this is not our custom.” I replied, “You know, it’s not really mine either, but let’s give it a try. Perhaps it will become our custom.”
With some hesitancy we moved forward… together. At our first celebration in the parish hall, our Mexican members built the communal altar while others watched. We decorated the Ofrenda with colored lights and bright-colored tissue paper cut with smiling skulls. There were flowers and fruit, and a large bone-shaped bread dusted with sugar and hand carried from Oaxaca where the mother of one of our members is the village baker. Photos of deceased loved ones nestled beside handmade paper skeletons. A tiny papier-mâché dog skeleton with a green hat held a loaf of bread in its mouth while little plates of food and even a bottle of Corona stood waiting. In the middle was a cross with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in its center.
All Souls’ Day is celebrated in many countries, most often by visits to the graves of loved ones, which are swept, cleaned and often ornately decorated with seasonal flowers. Families spread blankets and share picnics with others who have come to honor and remember their loved ones. These customs have roots in the European Middle Ages. In Mexico, the celebration brought by Spanish missionaries has incorporated elements from pre-Christian native cultures. As with many things Mexican, this fiesta has taken on color and energy with the richness of multi-layered symbolism. Perhaps it is the hint of these indigenous roots that surprise us and attract us too.
At St. Stephen’s, our custom of Día de los Muertos is an evolving one. What began as an experiment in folk religion has become a liturgy of remembrance. Our celebration of All Saints and All Souls are now seamlessly joined by a procession from the nave to the adjoining chapel where the Ofrenda in all its gaudy glory is censed and blessed. Alfredo sounds the conch shell used by generations of his family to summon workers to supper. The deep, mournful tone fills the soaring spaces of St. Stephen’s and fills our hearts as well. We call out the names of those we love but no longer see. We light tapers and set them in the sand in a large cooking pot. Brightly colored sticky notes bear the names of loved ones on the wall of remembrance. And in an extension of our Eucharistic feast, we share our favorite foods in a pot-luck of joy and remembrance.
We can now claim we have worked together to make this custom ours. We have been enriched beyond measure by our common worship. New life has been born out of a splendid celebration of diversity and tradition. The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, a feast day too often forgotten, helps us see the saints we have known, loved and still love side-by-side with the glorious saints that inhabit Butler’s Lives of the Saints sporting the halos in religious iconography. All are part of the Great Cloud of Witnesses that surrounds us. In a bright and shining moment, we recognize the truth of the words the English speakers sing at the Offertory, “for the saints of God are just folk like me…God help me to be one too.”
The Rev. Sarabeth Goodwin is Latino Missioner at St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C.