32

November 2

ALL SOULS’ DAY

For Halloween Eliza wanted to be Nightmare Moon from My Little Ponies. I can’t do more than thread a needle, so I ordered a costume for her from Etsy and asked my mom to help craft a black and purple tulle skirt. Josh found a 3T Spiderman outfit at the thrift store, so we talked up the superhero costume to Rowan. It wasn’t a hard sell.

I invited over old college classmates who lived nearby for soup and bread, followed by trick-or-treating in the Old Highland neighborhood. Halloween was on a Wednesday, in the middle of a hectic work week, and I scrambled to mince garlic and dice carrots while getting the children ready. I stirred pots of chicken with wild rice and savory ginger squash soups on the stove, then dashed to find compostable bowls and spoons from the cupboards, wipe down the bathroom sink, and pick up stray toys strewn about the floor. The kids raced around the house half dressed in their costumes, stopping every few minutes to ask if it was time to go trick-or-treating yet. Flustered, I sent them outside to set the picnic table with napkins, cups, and spoons.

As I opened the back door to let them out, I saw Josh pull into the driveway. He was driving our new used car we had bought earlier that day at the Brookdale Honda Dealership, where we had spent hours that morning sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, eating soft M&M cookies, and signing dozens of papers I barely understood under fluorescent lights. Josh had just started a new job teaching high school science across town and biking to work was no longer an option. Our days were spent scrambling to figure out how he was getting to work, how I would get to work, and who would pick up the kids in our sole car.

Josh got out of the car and waved. I waved back, taking in the new red car. A few days later, at a staff meeting, I would tell my coworkers about the car. “Two cars! You are living the American dream,” one of them teased. “We even have a gas grill,” I replied, throwing up my hands in faux astonishment. We were a long way from our days living in an intentional community at Jubilee Partners.

“What can I do?” Josh asked, walking in the backdoor and laying down his orange backpack. He turned and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Nice car,” I said, handing him a soup pot. “Carry this out to the picnic table? People should be here any minute.”

We trooped in and out the back door, carrying bowls and pitchers of water, and the cat escaped into the yard. Soon our friends Brandi and Sam from college were knocking on the front door, their kids dressed adorably as green dragons. The other couple, Sonya and David, pulled in the driveway and out popped a toddler pirate wearing an impressive three-cornered hat.

The kids tromped through dead brown leaves in the yard while we ladled up bowls of soup and cajoled them to eat a little something before the glut of candy to come. I sat at the picnic bench, watching our friends with their children. Wiping mouths. Buttering bread. Calmly explaining why poking one’s sister with sticks was not okay. We all graduated from the same evangelical college the same year, and within a few years we all married people we’d met there. Now, nearly ten years later, children wandered around us wearing superhero masks and fake black mustaches—our children.

I watched my friend Sonya hold her one-year-old baby and remembered when we were accountability partners in college, meeting to pray together and confess our sins in the fireside room of the student center. We first met on a mission trip to Honduras over spring break, a year before Josh and I would meet on a similar trip to Denver. I wasn’t really sure what Sonya believed these days.

I wasn’t sure what any of us believed. Out of the six adults, only three of us went to church semiregularly. To use the language we once spoke fluently (“God’s will,” “my walk with Jesus,” “What I am learning spiritually right now?”) now would have felt like dropping a poopy diaper in the middle of the picnic table. Instead, we swapped stories of childhood Halloweens. Some had spent them at trunk-or-treat parties. Others weren’t allowed to dress up like ghosts or witches because a popular Christian radio program said they were demonic. Our parents had worked so hard to raise us in the faith, to protect us from the temptations of secular culture. Yet here we were, with our own children, happily participating in a holiday that celebrated ghosts, zombies, and spiderwebbed graveyards.

When it was time for trick-or-treating, we stacked the dishes in the kitchen and loaded into cars to drive a half mile down the street. David ran to a liquor store and met us later with a carafe of spiked hot cider for the parents to share. As we herded our kids from door to door, helping them climb up cement stairs and knock on painted doors, I wondered if our kids would attend church when they are our age.

“This is where the nuns live!” Eliza shouted, pointing to a large yellow house with a blue Peace sign in the front yard before charging up the steps in a blur of black and purple tulle.

Sister Katherine was there and ready with a smile. “Stina!” she said, giving me a hug, before oohing over my children’s costumes and those of my friends’ children. I smiled back at the familiar face. It had been just a year earlier that we had first met, on this very night. It had been colder and darker then, I remembered, and everything about the neighborhood unfamiliar.

The children held out their plastic jack-o-lanterns and the nuns dropped in several pieces of candy.

“Did you get my email?” Sister Suzanne asked me as she plunked Smarties and wrapped chocolates in shiny foil into their buckets. “I sent you an article. We’ll discuss it when the Visitation Companions meet again soon.”

“Yes, yes I got it,” I said, leaning over to give her a side hug.

“We will also go over the final discernment retreat instructions,” she said. “Make sure you schedule yours soon. And remember the Advent commissioning.”

I nodded and assured her that I was on it. The kids were already out the door, so I gave my hasty goodbyes and slipped out the front door after them. Josh was waiting on the sidewalk, at the bottom of the stairs. I spotted my friend Randi and her kids, who had already been out for nearly an hour and whose candy bags looked heavy. She told me what streets they had already hit, and which house was giving out bratwurst and beer for the grown-ups.

I looked back at the monastery as the kids moved on to the next house, bounding up its steps. Somehow I had imagined this moment to be different. Here we were, on the anniversary of meeting the nuns, and I wanted it to be profound somehow. Would I see the saints I had journeyed with over the past twelve months among the trick-or-treaters on the street? Jane, with her commitment to God after forgiving her husband’s killer; Elisabeth, with her private spirituality and confidence in God’s promises; Margaret Mary, with her mystical knowledge of Jesus’ sacred heart; or Monica, with her trail of tissues and faithful prayers? I wanted to be able to look back on the year and see some kind of tangible change, to see how journeying with these mystical sisters had transformed my faith.

Instead my attention snapped back to reality—to Rowan, who was calling my name. He needed help picking up spilled candy. Eliza was already a house ahead, and I yelled after her, “Slow down, wait for us!” while Josh trotted after her to catch up. Our friends stood nearby, and I needed to ask thoughtful questions about their work, about their plans for Thanksgiving.

There was nothing profound about it. I didn’t see the saints darting in and out of my peripheral vision; I didn’t imagine them dwelling in the homes that we visited. I was caught back up in the daily scramble of family life. Yet I sensed God with us even here, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

We approached a street and crossed it together, the grown-ups holding the hands of the kids in a long daisy chain.

While some Protestants host harvest parties in church basements, Catholics celebrate the fall holy days of All Hallows Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, a trio of remembrances for those who have gone before us. At my children’s Spanish-English dual-language preschool, they celebrate the Day of the Dead and even set up a little altar in the hallway between the classrooms so students can prop up photos of dead relatives to remember. At home, we play the movie Coco’s soundtrack and talk openly about death, about how when we die, we return to be with God.

At a staff meeting two days later, on the Feast of All Souls, my Catholic coworker Jessie asked us to bring a photo of a dead loved one, then to share a little about that person. At the end of our time of sharing, each person would say the dead person’s name, then the rest of the staff members would respond, “Pray for us.”

I spoke the name of my Swedish Lutheran mormor, Connie, and my German Mennonite grandmother, Elizabeth. I wonder if they turned a little in their graves when our crew of Catholics and Protestants called on them to pray for us. The traditional Catholic understanding of the communion of saints, where we can continue to pray with and for the dead, is that the veil between life and death is thinner than we suppose.

I ran across an article online by someone called “Super Saved Catholic Dave,” who lays out a scriptural foundation for this practice and draws on the earliest Christian writers—Origen, Saint Cyprian, Saint Jerome—as believing in the intercession of saints and angels. I read another article by the archbishop of St. Louis, who writes that the dead can “accompany us on our individual spiritual journeys” and can “communicate with us along the way.”

This makes more sense to me, especially as I turn to my Catholic prayer book and read about the saints’ lives. They speak to me now through their biographies and writings. I sometimes hear Saint Francis de Sales’s words in my ears when I oversleep or snap at my husband: “Be gentle, be gentle with yourself.” Sometimes I speak back, “Got it, Francis.”

Over Thanksgiving, my in-laws come to visit. We set up a makeshift bedroom with a sliding curtain that partitions their space off from the front living room. Since they can’t close a door, our children often crawl in their bed early in the morning for snuggles and to read books. My in-laws claim they don’t mind. Josh and I believe them, relishing the extra hour of sleep in the morning.

My in-laws are early risers and have a daily practice of prayer and reading their devotional books and Bibles. I come downstairs, still in my pajamas, and my mother-in-law is reading the children’s Bible to Eliza. Later, my daughter draws pictures of Jesus and writes words like “faith,” “love,” and “hope,” and presents them to me proudly.

The holiday goes smoothly; we roast a Thanksgiving chicken and make yeast rolls using Mamaw’s recipe. We go for walks along Cedar Lake Trail and spend hours raking up leaves in the backyard. My in-laws are the easiest of houseguests (they wash dishes! make dinner! help fold laundry!) and laugh easily, goofing off with the children. I don’t want them to leave.

But after we drop them at the airport, Josh confesses to me that it happened again.

“My dad said that he is sad because we won’t be spending eternity together,” Josh says.

“He said that?” I respond, plopping down on the couch beside him and taking his hand.

“Yeah. When you guys were in the other room, he asked to have a conversation. I knew that the visit was going too well. I knew something like this was coming.”

“Wow,” I say, “I am so sorry.” We sit there, side-by-side, in silence.

The words roll around in my head: Not spending eternity together. I know they are doing their best to love Josh, that these awkward conversations come from a sincere place. But how much fear must be nestled in their hearts, a real fear that their son is going to hell and will be separated from God, forever?

“We are praying for Josh every day,” my mother-in-law had told me when we were peeling potatoes into long skinny spirals on Thanksgiving morning. “We’re grateful that you are bringing the kids to church.”

I nodded, then changed the subject.

I wished they wouldn’t try to convert Josh, even if I understood their fear. I’d felt the same fear prickling in my throat when I spoke with atheists on the Camino or when I invited my nonbelieving peers to youth group in high school. At Bible camp, I shared my testimony on wilderness trips, trying to fit my faith experience into a conversion narrative that would appeal to my campers. Just accept Jesus into your heart, and your life will be transformed. I feel that fear even now, somedays, when I wonder if my own kids will be Christians when they grow up.

Faith in my thirties has been unpredictable—one that doesn’t fit into a tidy before-and-after salvation testimony—and my evangelical impulses have faded along with my certainty. I believe that God never relents in loving and reconciling all things, even as I struggle with unanswered questions around heaven, hell, and salvation. And on the days I doubt even that, I call on my mystical sisterhood of saints—my Jane, Elisabeth, Margaret Mary, and Monica—to pray for us all.