Remembering our love ones, passed on

'Let the busy world be hushed' by Fr Jason Murphy.

Fr Jason Murphy has a special message this November when we remember our loved ones passed on...

The good cups and saucers were laid out on the table beneath the kitchen window that looked out on to the back yard, the set that was kept in the glass cabinet for show and only took out of a first Friday when Fr Maguire would come to call. The ones with the daffodil and foxglove pattern that had the stamp of Carraigaline beneath the bottom of the saucer. She had bought them years ago from Paddy Smith, a travelling salesman from Ballinamore, having paid up on them week by week. They were carefully laid out, four settings; cups, saucers and side plates with a teaspoon each and a bone handled knife laid down on each side plate to spread the butter.

It was getting late on this Hallowe’en evening for visitors to be calling bar the children in false faces aclad, going round the houses singing the song they had learned at school, ‘Hallowe’en is coming when we’ll be, dressed in funny clothes and then we’ll see, pumpkins in the windows shining bright, oh we’ll have a good time on Hallowe’en night’.

I followed her instructions of pouring the milk in to a small glass jug, sugar in a clean bowl, currany bread laid out on the board covered in a clean tea towel and a pound of Killeshandra butter cut in two and put neatly into a glass butter dish in the centre of the table.

‘Who’s visiting granny at this time of the night?’ I boldly asked as the sounds of Radio Éireann wafted out from the wireless above on the dresser and she covered the red coals in the jubilee range with wet slack to keep it stoked for the night long.

‘I’m not sure who’s coming’ she answered ‘or if they’ll come at all but I’ll lay the table ready for them in case they pass this way. My mother told me many years ago when I was a little girl to make sure to make them welcome, the Holy Souls and when they pass this way, they’ll stop and, knowing they were welcomed, they will pass on in peace just as they came.’

Of course for a little child, it seemed somewhat scary that the dead came to visit this house but little did I or my great-granny know in those years of the 1980s that she was carrying on a tradition that had first being initiated by the early Celts some 1,500 years before. As the new year dawned and the old year ended on the eve of November 1st, the great feast of Samhain, the Celts believed that, at the point of midnight, there came a crack in the year and from the underworld there escaped the discontented dead who roamed the earth.

People lit fires to ward them off, others wore false faces to look like them so that they might take the living for one of their own and pass on by, doing no harm. Others laid out food from their winter store of nuts and fruit gathered from the forests for to welcome them in, that they might return to the place where they lived and leave contented, knowing that they were remembered.

And so today though far we are distanced from the traditions of our past, we still wear false faces to hide our true identity; we light bon fires and go trick or treating, calling to houses up and down the streets looking for a treat and, should we not be welcomed, we, like the passing souls, might do a mischief as the people believed in the homesteads of old.

As Christianity came to Ireland in the sixth century and beyond, the early Church embraced the Celtic traditions of the past to illustrate that the Christian God was not far removed from the Gods they worshipped, their traditions and festivals were subsumed into the Church Calendar with Samhain, Imbolg, Bealtaine and Lughnasa all becoming part of the high points of the Church’s year and so my great-granny born in the early 1900s was only carrying on the traditions of many past generations, generations of people unknown to her.

In this month of November when the winds blow and the rains fall and the light decreases with the closing of the year, we are reminded of death all around us as nature speaks in her hushed tones. We are reminded that life too is a circle and as with the passing of the year, we too will know the seasons in the living of our lives.

We remember too in this month of reflection, as people slowed and retreated indoors to gather around the hearth and tell stories of remembrance, all the people who have gone before us, of all times and places, of all streets and townlands, their names etched on headstones and those long forgotten, at the going down of the winter’s sun in the evening and in its rising in the morning, we will remember them.

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