"ALL HALLOWS DAY"

 “ALL HALLOWS DAY”

For over 1200 years the Western Christian church has celebrated November 1 as All Hallows Day (“hallow” as in “Hallowed be Thy Name”), or All Saints Day.  It is a time to remember and to give thanks for those saints who have gone before us – as one writer put it, All Saints Day enables us to keep alive those who have passed on, as long as we are alive.  In some traditions, the night before All Hallows Day was a time when the mean and dangerous spirits were released. It became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween as we now know it.  In the Irish tradition, these mean spirits emerged from the ground to seek to do harm to those who had been their enemies in life.  In order to avoid these spirits on All Hallows Eve, people would disguise themselves with costumes and other ways – leading to our present day costumes of Halloween.  There are many other origin stories of Halloween, and one of the different ones is the Mexican tradition of “Dia los de Muertos” or “Day of the Dead,” which is more of a joyful celebration than the European conflicted one.

Today, however, I’m observing the All Saints Tradition and remembering the saints who have gone before me.  I am blessed that there are many in my life, but I’m remembering 5 today:  Mary Elizabeth Armour Stroupe, Bernice Green, Harold Jackson, Harmon Wray, and Azzie Preston.  They are not in order of importance, but rather in the chronological order when they came into my life.

Although I indicated that these 5 saints are not in order of importance, the first one, Mary Armour Stroupe, is by far the most important.  I am working on a memoir of her life and my life together tentatively entitled “Mother and Me: A Story of Power, Race and Gender.”  There will be much more about her in that book, but for now I will just say that she saved my life and gave me love and hope.  It took me a lot longer than it should have to recognize that all the while I was pining away for  my absent and fleeing father, she stayed with me and loved me and gave me a vision of what life could be. 

There were two primary “Bernice” people in my life.  One was my great-great aunt (my great-grandmother’s sister) with whom Mother and I lived after we moved to Helena.  I called her “Gran”, and I’ve written about her elsewhere, including the upcoming memoir.  The other was my great aunt Bernice, named after “Gran,” and while she was technically my mother’s aunt, she and Mother were more like sisters.  I called her “BB,” and I fondly remember her as a strong advocate for me in our conservative family structure.  Even as I moved to the left a bit, changing my mind on race, and growing my hair long, she remained a strong source of support.  She never agreed with me on these issues, but she always warned her husband and many other family members: “Don’t mess with that boy – besides my own sons, he is my favorite.”  

Reverend Harold Jackson was my minister in my adolescent years, and he offered a model to me of a male minister who did not have to give up his masculinity in order to be a minister.  The church was important to me in my youth, and many of the church members told me that I should go into the ministry.  I resisted that notion, with one of the main reasons being that my experience of ministers (all male at that time) was that they had to give up passion, politics, and personality – in other words, they were basically non-persons.  Harold changed that – he brought passion and politics and personality to the church and the pulpit.  Although it would be awhile before I decided that I might try the ministry, Harold gave me a vision of what that might look like.

I met Harmon Wray in college – he was a philosophy major like me, and he was an only child like me.  He was a passionate and fierce, and yet he was exceedingly gentle.  He and I were on the Honor Council at Southwestern (he was the president), and one of our records was that during our tenure on the HC, no one was convicted on an honor code offense – several put on probation but no real convictions or expulsions.  We also refused to prosecute cases of women not signing out to their actual destinations but who instead lied that they were going to their aunts overnight.  Males were not required to do this, so we refused to enforce it, thus helping to end “in loco parentis.”  I still mourn Harmon’s untimely death in 2007.

I’ve written about Azzie Preston in previous blogs – she was an African-American elder at Oakhurst when we arrived there.  She was one of the African-Americans who was not hesitant to engage me as her white pastor, and I remember well a call from her after one of our African-American members died.  Azzie wasted no time in calling me to say:  “I bet that you have never done a Black funeral before – is that right?”  When I hesitatingly said, “No, I haven’t, but…..” She jumped in and said:  “Well, I’ll need to come by and teach you a few things.”  And she did.  Later that same year she agreed to be an agent of change at Oakhurst by helping to shift the nominating committee to ensure that we would get strong Black members on the Session, the governing board of the church.  She was also strongly involved in justice issues at her place of employment, so much so that she received death threats at work.  My heart also leaned towards her because her husband was killed by a cousin in 1985, and she raised her children as a single mom.  Like Harmon, she also died way before her time – in 2010.

    On this All Saints Day, I am grateful to all these saints (and many others) who nurtured me and challenged me and gave me a vision of life and love.  As you go through your day on this All Saints Day, name some of the saints in your life too.  Lift up a prayer and give thanks for them!  And, may we live our lives so that someday, someone may lift us up also!