All Soles’ Day

Holy Saturday Eve got us the ghosts and goblins “trick or treating” on our doorsteps. Sunday was for the saints, the parade of the extraordinary and exemplary good guys and gals of our adoration marching on gilded roads. 

Today is for everyone who ever walked this earth, anima to Aquinas who claimed that only humans have immortal souls. The Hindu and the Jain include mountains and rivers to be endowed with spirit, a rather contemporary notion. Today, it is the ones buried six feet under the ground, feasted on by worms, or whipped up cleanly to the skies in the cremated smoke of the oven, kiln, or pyre that we memorialize. It’s every soul before a stone slab marker, or a tombstone, or a memorial, for those who quit moving insteps, stopped twitching toes and now keeps peripatetic soles stationary forever!

In my youth, we snickered at the medieval purgatory conveniently created for spirits in limbo until prayers are offered when they rise up into the clouds of angels and harps in the heavenly sphere. That is like shopping for polyester socks at Costco and suddenly, Uncle Tom takes us to the T Galleria to pick out your choice of non-solid colors for a year’s supply of boutique branded cottons and wools. Now, that literally is all soles day!

Wikipedia defines “soul” as the incorporeal and perceived immortal essence of a living thing, and to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), immortal souls only belong to humans. Ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) use the word psyche, and the spirit of the Earth as a living organism is anima mundi.

Gee, someone clamors for etymology. OK. “Soul” derives from the Old sawol/sawel in Beowulf, a cognate to the Gothic saiwala, old German sela, Franconia sila, Norse sala and Lithuanian siela. It meant “coming from or belonging to the sea/lake”; inland Teutons thought highly of mysterious blue lakes and improbable open seas. Got that?

In the same vein, common Greek (Koine) used psyche for “life breath that blows and cools” (as opposed to the terminal soma, the material body that eventually rots), which harkens to the Mesopotamian Hebrew nepash, “vital breath,” that became ruah to Paul of Tarsus, which finally got Roman branding as spiritus dei, Spirit of God! 

All right, ‘nuff tutorials, already!

It is fun to contemplate all the swirling sinners followed by the solemn saints, and finally, the spirited soles. You might guess we are having fun!

It is the temporality, the finitude of our souls that scares the bejesus out of most of us (this is a family paper, and bejesus, though disrespectful in another time, is still used by old teachers; though uncouth “s__it” do just fine). Let’s face it, even the cognoscente among us resent the notion of finitude of consciousness, to cease in time, so we resign to have our bodies join forever the chemical pool of the planet.

The food and candles on the tombstone, meant for the departed, are actually salves to our shaking souls. The vigil and wake on the newly dead assault our waking hours. But we wish to make sure that the next generation will light a candle for us when we are gone with a semblance of respect and fond memory.

It is All Souls’ Day and if you are reading this piece like it was a meant to be a downer, your slip is showing, your expectation for immortality was addressed. We would be the last not to celebrate the human community’s decision to mark and affirm the awareness of the “breath of life” from way back but finding temporal reality in our body. After all, the image of the MD or the nurse spankin’ the heine just so we can wail our first after living off the umbilical cord for a long while and finally getting air into our chest is a wonder of creation.

Wah! You’re right, we wah’d our way into existence, and we are grateful not so much because there were hands ever ready to hold us firm when we fell, but because we are into a journey of growth and consciousness; we discovered a resilient spirit that kept evolving, giving physical form and mental image to what constitutes “I, me, and myself.” 

In a time when the privileged and cultured elites brand self-consciousness as morally self-centered in defense of their own vanity, we are clear that the image of “myself” is my sole responsibility, a product of my own making, though many would like to live their nosey imprints on my existence and essence.

All right, we will avoid getting philosophical. What transpires today, in all the simplicity of tombstone gestures, is profound in significance. It is “religious”; life as it is given is affirmed in spite of our longing that “some more or someone else” is intensely yearned for, to add to “what is.” It is this sentimental longing that defines our humanity, and though the images are filled with illusions and delusions, we are assured that the bright candlelight flickering on the tombstone affirms that our particular sole is worth walking on, in and out of the way; it rests in peace.