Loving the Dead

Four years ago around now I made a visa run out of Ukraine and got to spend the weekend in southern Poland exploring Krakow and Częstochowa. I got to see some really neat stuff, but one of the most endearing and enduring memories I have is of leaving the little chapel in Krakow where I'd gone for an early All Saints/Sunday Mass and seeing how many people were already in the adjacent cemetery on that sunny, cold fall morning to visit the graves of their loved ones, many of them not only bringing flowers, but even picnic baskets so that they could share some time together as a family, both living and dead. It was such a profoundly moving and beautiful thing, and now whenever these three days of Halloween (All Hallows Eve), All Saints, and All Souls roll around I can't help thinking of that cold morning in Krakow and the warmth of those people's love. I hope we all are blessed to have such enduring love in our lives!

Quote of the Day: Fr. Alexander Elchaninov

"In our present life everything is so uncertain, insecure, painful, almost intolerable, that death in no way appears as something terrifying. I often think of death as a calm and luminous haven, where there is no sickness, no sadness and, in particular, no parting. When, during morning and evening prayers, I pray for my loved ones in minutes of sadness, I am almost glad to think that I will soon be with them, and their life seems more certain than our phantom existence."

From page 117 of "The Diary of a Russian Priest," a posthumous compilation of the notes of Fr. Alexander Elchaninov, a Russian Orthodox priest who served in the south of France after the Bolshevik Revolution.