Approaching the Day of the Dead

In about a week one the best holidays in North America takes place: Dia de los Muertos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead ). A pre-colonial holiday that survived the Conquistadors, the spiritual conquests of the Church Militant and the concomitant collapse of Mesoamerica's indigenous civilizations --a fitting history for a holiday whose central purpose is honoring the spirits of those who have come before.

An industrialized culture whose members must show up for their shift or incur the wrath of "The Man" has no time, no space to spend a few days reflecting on deceased love ones or the continuity of memory with the past. Memory preserves the dead from oblivion, enlarges the community and the world that we move through, connecting us to people and spaces beyond ourselves.

The celebration of memory is the admission of mortality. Taking time to remember what has passed confronts us with the threat of our own passing. In our culture, Christianity is often applied as an anaesthetic to this fact. Death is made illusory by the promise of paradise, or even worse, life is. Memory holds life and death in tension. A culture of memory sustains the living with the promise that death will not cause them to lose their place in the community.

This trait is uniquely isolated from much of the rest of the Christian ethos in the Eucharist. Jesus remains continually embodied and relatable in the quotidian human need to eat. As much as his followers may cast their cares at his feet, Jesus remains human: He weeps. He gets angry. He gets tired. He loves. He eats. He dies.

Dia de los Muertos also preserves the humanity of those who have died. Favorite candies are laid out for the dead or pillows for spirits that have traveled far. A spiritual world no longer touched by human concerns is nihilistic, an escapist fantasy. Subjected to a pristine heaven the Saints join the pantheon as demigods in God’s feudal service while the more mundane among us disappear into the celestial ether.

Celebration of the Day of the Dead is neither morbid nor gloomy. It is in fact a celebration of life, an affirmation of this life. The best thing is to be remembered within the context of a community by those who loved you not to deny death by acquiescing to a wish for a painless immortality. The “bliss” of a world beyond this one has no meaning except to express a this-worldly desire for a cessation of struggle and suffering or for a perfect, unchanging happiness.

The problem is that a posthumous return to Eden is a relevant idea only in binary relation to the concerns of this world, and only as a desire originating from this world. It is an exemplification of the Jewish and Christian idea that Death is an evil. It is not an evil when it is held in tension with the fact that life is pregnant with its own finitude. It is the unbearable lightness that underlines the length of our days and so lends our days their gravity.

Conversely, the denial of death’s reality is also the denial of this life’s richness. It is a discontented hope that longs for a cup where no bitter is intermingled with the sweet. It fails to understand that the sweet contains within itself its own bitterness. A celebration of memory such as the Day of the Dead wholistically encompasses this dynamic. Remembering ancestors in this way recognizes the cycle of life and death. It honors the embedded-ness of human concerns and celebrates a community whose past stretches into the depths of time and forward to an unknown horizon. --jga