UGANDA: The Power of the Dead Is Not Fiction: A Reflection On November 2 Commemorations
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After parents, relatives or friends die, it is respectful to bury them with honour and where possible, to visit and clean their graves regularly. Instead of praying for them in fear, it is good to address personal intentions to God through their intercession and even bring them news about important events in the family like weddings, ordinations, baptisms, new born babies or how children are doing at school. If any of the close relatives is going through difficulties or has been ill, it is appropriate to ask for their prayers on his or her behalf.
Communion with the dead is very much an integral part of our African cultures. One of the reasons our families are strong is because we don’t easily let go of our dead ancestors. We don’t treat them as dust; we can’t imagine them as bones or as ashes. Long after they have died, they retain a vivid presence in our lives. We wish them to be around to look after us although we don’t necessarily want to see them. We are content to feel traces of them in the objects they left behind, or to catch fleeting glimpses of them in the faces and mannerisms of our siblings and children.
Unfortunately, despite the homilies that envelope our Catholic celebrations of All Saints’ Day and All Souls Day, there is something that does not change in us: fear of the dead. Yet all those who die in Christ, continue to live with us in faith. We need to seek their love instead of dreading their wrath. We need to let them connect with us as honest advisers because they have seen it all. When we request for intentions of Holy Masses in their memory, we are not simply appeasing, but appreciating them and praying for their souls to rest in eternal peace while assuring them that we are living our lives in a way that would make them proud. We draw comfort from being able to unburden ourselves by their presence.
Remembering the dead especially during the month of November for Catholics, is not because we want to blame them for leaving us with problems or to resent the vicious role they may have played in the misunderstandings and conflicts that have split the family. This practice is typical of our well founded Catholic Doctrine and are clearly grounded in a notion of life as consisting of the physical body and a spirit that does not perish with the body at the moment of death.
It is generally believed that Christianity offers the best preparation for death. The Catholic Catechism offers a concept of life defined by two forms of time. There is God’s time known as eternity and finite time of human life. Humans have the chance to participate in God’s time through the soul. Death is certain, though we don’t know when and how it will come for each one of us. We may not know what will happen to our souls after our death, but the Catholic faith prescribes a way of living that makes God’s mercy to open a path of redemption and eternal life.
For the non-believers who pretend that death is where everything ends, the prayers, rituals and incantations accompanying the dead would have no meaning. In some circles, friends and loved ones might wish to celebrate a person’s life and publicly express their grief without the protocols supplied by religion. But it has never been easy to hold such memorials without being confronted by the awkwardness that summons the awareness of what is missing.
It is in this context that the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas once bewailed the modern age’s failure to find a suitable replacement for the religious way of coping with death. Religion in Africa has not lost its social significance under modernity. If there is a question that disturbs non-believers is death and its eternal life! The suffocation of the religion can never make the truth useless.
In Africa, faith has not retreated into the private sphere, as had been predicted. Indeed, today there is a resurgence of public religions. What is becoming the norm in modernity, however, is the view that a religious description of the world including death is only one of many available descriptions. However, as death affects everyone, we need to have a clear agreement that knowing its true ways is not optional.
The Catholic Church designated that 2nd November in every calendar year be the feast of All Souls. This feast celebrates the past memories of all faithful departed who remain important members of our families. In the West, the tradition of setting aside a day of prayer and commemoration for the dead dates back to St. Odilo of Cluny, who established it at his abbey in France in the 10th century. From there, the practice spread until it was officially adopted everywhere in the 14th century. Traditions associated with the feast include placing the names of those to be remembered on the altar at Mass and visiting the cemeteries where the loved ones who went before us lie. With time, the entire month of November has become informally known as the month of the dead.
The third millennium generation is not especially comfortable with death. From the hospital to the mortuary, people make their passage out of this world through a series of specialized procedures including post-mortem, cleaning, sterilizing and dressing; all discreetly hidden from the living whom they might cause discomfort, but this can never make the dead a fiction.
The reality is that dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In former days, dying at a hospital was reserved for people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. But times have changed, and these days, of the half a million people who die each year in Uganda, only a small percent do so in their home. A big percent though, say they would like to die at home if given the choice so that their dear ones are around them. Today the dying are hidden away and death is made an alien, an abnormal occurrence, a pathogen to be contained. There is nothing familiar or intimate about death in our current approach which is a pity.
This view of death is not without precedent, of course. The Bible refers to the “angel of death” Exodus 12:23 who visits the houses of the Egyptians and passes over those of the Israelites. Death is truly otherworldly here, not merely a natural process, but an eruption of the judgment of God, destructive and implacable. However, Christ willed to undergo death. Of all humanity, Christ alone had the right to avoid death, but he accepted it as the only way his eternal glory.
It is easy to see why we should pray for the souls of the dead. It is less obvious why we should bathe their bodies tenderly and sing over them; why we should sit up with them in the night, why we should inter them with ceremonies and visit their graves bearing flowers that they cannot smell. However, the truth is that all human civilizations have their own careful prescriptions regarding the dead; how to honour or pacify them, how to be keep apart from their physical corruption. And for us Christians, we extend charity beyond the grave as an imitation of Christ’s mercy, which reached out to us even when we were spiritually dead.
Burying the dead is also a sign of hope in Christ’s promise. The bodies of the dead are not discarded vessels, but integral parts of a human being that will be reunited on the last day. The separation is temporary, and they are still worthy of our respect and our love. It may be tempting, during the month of November, to yield prematurely to the flash and calmer charms of Christmas, to the jingle bells and stars in the east and merry gentlemen. But let the dead have November and other moments in our lives. Let them have this sombre, chilly month, with its grey rainy skies. Say a prayer for all the departed during this month, and if you can, visit the resting places of your beloved dead.
We will be reunited with them in the world to come but, until then, it is good to grieve their separation. It is good to hold those who have gone before us as both objects of mercy and reverence. To mourn as a Christian is to hold both the fullness of loss and the promise of restoration at once. This promise will be fulfilled because Jesus says “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” Matthew 5:4. May the dead rest in eternal peace.
By Rev. Fr. Paulino Mondo, MCCJ
