On Souls and Saints
"The veil between here and heaven is thin.”
My friend Erica Tighe Campbell wrote a gorgeous book on the liturgical year: Living the Seasons: Simple Ways to Celebrate the Beauty of Your Faith throughout the Year. It’s filled with creative ideas that you can actually do to cultivate a deeper spirituality of liturgical living. You can get 15% off here with code FANUCCI15 and it’s a perfect gift.
Speaking of two great feast days, here’s a favorite for this week: “All Saints and All Souls are thin places on the calendar, arriving each year as light fades and days shorten, leaves fall and gardens shrivel. Frost paints icy death on the grass each morning, and wind carries whispers of cold. We need to remember, now more than ever, that the veil between here and heaven is thin.” (For All Our Souls)
Cameron Bellm dives into the thin places in her latest Attention and Astonishment: “The month of the holy souls reminds me to repudiate what I think of as temporal superiority—the idea that because we are the humans that happen to be drawing breath at this moment, we matter more than those who preceded us or will follow us, the idea that we are somehow more real than they are.”
A powerful reflection on our shared mortality and the few places where we still tell the truth about death: We're All Dying, and the Church is Blessed to Know It from
.Grateful for wise words from
: “We used to get breathers between bad news…6:00 pm was Bad News Hour. We digested grainy clips of war with full bellies. Disaster arrived sandwiched between commercial breaks. And then we turned it off until the next day. It’s different now. The template shattered when we weren’t looking. Now, beauty and grief and wind and sun and delight and sorrow and concern and indifference and peace and war co-exist on a regular Tuesday.” (Read the rest here: Bright Death.)One more for All Saints, from my friend Patty Breen: My life went off script. Mary Magdalene showed up to help.