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When All Souls Day falls on a Sunday it draws sharp attention to an “unofficial triduum” that happens every year. My family calls it the Halloween Triduum, but “Triduum of the Dead” is better.
It includes Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day, and it is the perfect way to kick off the month of November, when we pray for the dead.
It’s fascinating how this Autumn “triduum” mirrors the Paschal Triduum.
Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Holy Saturday Easter Vigil make up the real Triduum. And while I realize that Halloween is nothing at all compared to Holy Thursday, I include it anyway because of its Catholic roots and its popularity. Note the similarities between the two, from the silly to the solemn:
- Both involve candy.
- Both include a vigil.
- Both inspire prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
That last similarity comes straight from the Vatican Directory on Popular Piety, which recommends offering prayers, “alms, deeds, works of mercy, fasting and … indulgences” for the dead in November.
But also, given the Agony in the Garden: Both begin with horror and end with hope.
The first day of the Triduum of the Dead, increasingly, focuses on hell.
Halloween has always been spooky. I love how, on the first Halloween, the bones of martyrs lined the streets of Rome as the Pantheon was exorcised to expel the devil.
But, increasingly, hell has taken center stage, as Halloween has become a day for horror movies and horrifying costumes. That is bad news in many ways — but it’s also good news, at least a little. On Halloween, our mainstream culture openly acknowledges the supernatural — and the horror movie genre reveals a truth: There really is a devil, he really does wish us harm, and we really are helpless before him without Christ.
My favorite hymn for Halloween is Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence — because it tells us the only true reason to “with fear and trembling stand;” and describes how Christ comes “That the powers of hell may vanish.”
The second day of the “Triduum of the Dead” focuses on heaven.
The dark side of Halloween is a caricature of our hopelessness. On Halloween, pleasure seekers dress as the things they fear — or the things they can never be — and walk through the dark seeking candy, or less wholesome pleasures if they are young adults.
But after the long night of Halloween, “there breaks a yet more glorious day” when “the saints triumphant rise in bright array,” as the hymn “For All the Saints” describes.
The readings at Mass describe how Jesus Christ turned horror into hope. First, we visit heaven, where a “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue” have “washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.” Then, we learn that we are not built for the pale party pleasures of Halloween — we are built for the kingdom of God, which belongs to the “poor in spirit,” the “meek,” and “peacemakers.”
The third day of the “Triduum of the Dead” is All Souls Day, and it focuses on hope.
This special feast radically challenges our misunderstandings about death.
If we think heaven is an automatic “passing over” that ends our life, it reminds us of purgatory. If we think purgatory is a place of limbo or torment, is teaches us it’s the pain of love. And if we think of God as an angry judge trying to catch us doing wrong, Jesus assures he does not intend to lose anything the Father gave him — meaning us.
“Remember, O loving Jesus, ’twas for my sake thou came to earth;” says the day’s hymn, Dies Irae; “let me not then be lost on that day.”
All Souls Day turns the horror of death into a hope that “does not disappoint.”
The most important thing Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls do is point to the Four Last Things.
St. John Paul II called the four last things — heaven, hell, death, and judgement — “essential,” saying: “In a culture which tends to imprison man in the earthly life” the Church reveals “beyond the mysterious gates of death, an eternity of joy in communion with God or the punishment of separation from him.”
The “Triduum of the Dead” is only the beginning of our meditation on that.
