Halloween’s Jack O’Lanterns may be gone, and the last Trick-or-Treater long since consumed his last bit of candy. But the “thinness of the veil between the worlds” of which innumerable writers speak at this time of year — and with as many meanings as those writing it — nevertheless remains. All Saints and All Souls may swiftly pass, as may the Octave of All Saints, each day of which allows one to gain a plenary indulgence when praying in a cemetery. November 3’s feast of St. Hubert, however, may remind us of the bygone majesty of hunting deer, boar, and other game with horse and hound. November 11 — Veterans’ Day, Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day — calls to mind the millions who have died in modern wars — particularly but not exclusively World War I. The eleventh also happens to be Martinmas. The Third Thursday in the Month is American Thanksgiving, where we give thanks for many things, but not least our family and friends — living or dead. On St. Andrew’s Day, those of with Scots blood remember that small but proud country of tartans and loyalty — of Sir William Wallace, King Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. November is also Black Catholic History Month, wherein we may meditate in particular upon the six American black candidates for Sainthood. But all of November is the Month of the Holy Souls. Our dead of various kinds — relatives, friends, historic characters, all the Holy Souls, and all the Saints — are not far from us in this enchanted time of year.
My attendance at the Center’s annual conference this year took me as usual to New England, which is a region filled with memory for me. All four of my grandparents lived there at various times in their chequered lives, and despite descending primarily from more recent immigrants, it appears from recent research that we have a few drops of Old Yankee DNA, going back to the Great Puritan Migration of the 17th century. Certainly, the entire region holds on to the past as tightly as it can. Salem may foolishly cling to the nightmare of witchcraft, and Boston and its environs to the overthrow of Royal Government in 1775-76, but there is much more to the Six Yankee States than this. Open air museums are popular, from Plimoth Plantation to Old Sturbridge Village. There are historic restaurants and bars aplenty, from Stockbridge’s Red Lion Inn to Westminster’s Old Mill to Sudbury’s Wayside Inn (one of my favourites) to Concord’s Colonial Inn to Newport’s White Horse — and on and on. Colonial era churches and cemeteries dot the landscape, as do a great many more recent ones of various descriptions. Historic houses also dot the landscape — not least those of the Transcendentalists, the several homes inhabited at different times by Hawthorne, Longfellow, Frost, and hosts of others.
From New England I took the train to New York City. The Vale of the Hudson rivals New England as a capital of the spooky October Country. My earliest memories cluster around Manhattan on the one hand, and the Westchester County town of Mount Kisco on the other. In the latter town I first trick or treated, and on its streets, and such spots where we used to meet them in Manhattan — the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Centre or the Big Clock at Grand Central Station — I can almost see my grandparents and my aunts — indeed, even my dear parents. Sleepy Hollow still has a touch of the magic Washington Irving described: “From the listless repose of the place, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow. Some say that the place was bewitched during the early days of the Dutch settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the descendants of the original settlers. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.” This magic is even more prevalent at Irving’s own home down the river, Sunnyside.
But the New York that lives in my head is not merely that of Irving or my own childhood memories. I dream of the New York my departed parents and grandparents knew — the New York of the Roaring 20s, the Depression, and World War II, of the Golden Age of Broadway, of Speakeasies and Jazz Clubs, of 5th Avenue patricians and Greenwich Village Bohemians, of Jimmy Walker and Fr. Edward Curran. My fancy can wander back further still, to the New York described by Marie Dressler as Carlotta Vance in the 1933 film Dinner at Eight: “I belong to the Delmonico period. Table at the window looking out on Fifth Avenue. Boxes with flowers, and pink lampshades…string orchestra and I don’t know…Yes. Willow plumes, Inverness capes…dry champagne and snow on the ground. They don’t even have snow anymore.” That was the “Little Old New York” made famous in Victorian and Edwardian revues like The Girl from Rector’s. Just as there are many layers of the departed in New England so there are in New York.
It is also true in our nation’s capital, which was my third and last stop. Although — except for Georgetown — DC has no colonial memories, it certainly has a past — both personal, for me, and public, for itself. Living there in the Summer of 1982, my social life centred around the Old Europe Restaurant and the Old Ebbits Grill; in later years I would come to love the Round Robin Bar of the Willard Hotel (the lobby of which — given the establishment’s closeness to White House and Capitol — was the chosen ground of the first “lobbyists”). Taken together, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress constitute a sort of national memory for the entire United States. The deeds done since the republic’s founding in the above noticed Capitol and White House are matched in their historical importance by those accomplished in the Supreme Court Building and the various buildings dedicated to the different departments of the cabinet. All the phases of our national life were worked out therein — the expanding young republic, the Second Civil War, the establishment of the country’s cultural identity, and its ascent into imperial status. For all of the changes that have taken place in even just the last few decades, the exteriors remain the same, and conjure up the past.
Outside the District, our honoured dead remain interred and continue to be given their due veneration at Arlington National Cemetery. So too with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at their homes at Monticello and Mount Vernon. Despite the inane and asinine war against Confederate Monuments and the memory of the “Lost Cause” waged throughout Northern Virginia in recent decades, the privately-owned Pamplin Park Civil War Museum near Petersburg attempts to give a balance picture of the conflict — as opposed to a great may public venues to-day. Robert E. Lee’s tomb at the chapel of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has not yet seen its occupant forcibly ejected as yet — although the battle flags that once festooned the site have been removed, and it has been walled off from the worship space.
All history is populated with human players — be that history our personal one, or those of the world, nation, state, county, city, town, or village. Save for a very few, all are dead — as shall be those who remain. Whilst we are still here in historic building or cemetery or battlefield contemplating our mortality and theirs, let us resolve to keep faith with them. To pray for them, indeed, but also to strive to attain the best of what they lived, worked, suffered, and often enough died for. This is summed up rather well by Canadian war poet John McRae in his “In Flanders Fields”:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Not all old causes are worth fighting for, of course — a great many being something irrelevant in our time, if not partly or wholly wrong. But all those connected to the Catholic Faith, however tangentially, are worth revering to that degree, and worth using as inspiration to-day, for all of our efforts to extend the Kingship of Christ to every corner of our World. The Holy Souls whose month this is shall second our efforts.
