All Twenty-Seven Saints

I have been wondering what each of you might have been for Halloween this year. Would you have chosen K-Pop Demon Hunters like so many of your friends have? Or stayed classic — a witch, a cowgirl, a princess, something sparkly? Would your mom have let you eat all the candy you want, or would she have known to hide a few pieces for morning? I wonder what bits of costume you might have left scattered in the living room behind you — a trail of glitter or feathers — before falling into bed, long past your bedtime.

As Blake Collier wrote of death just yesterday: “Our mourning comes from the acknowledgement that [you are] not here.” You’re not here to carve a pumpkin with your dad or to sort your candy categorically into careful piles tonight. You won’t fight with your siblings over who gets to pick the trick-or-treating route or trade your Twix for Sour Patch just to feel your cheeks tighten. This is the first of many holidays, the ones that brim with the giggles of children, the ones that will achingly pass without yours.

I saw a post recently from an influencer in Texas suggesting that families “tone down” their Halloween front yard decor this year. As if fewer skeletons or bloodied tombstones might somehow blunt the sharp edge of grief. But the truth is, no sanitized lawn could soften the horror of living without these 27 girls. I wonder too if, for those who lost daughters and nieces and goddaughters, this year’s decorations might offer some kind of strange solace: “Yes. Death really is all around. At least the world is looking at it, too.”

Halloween has long occupied a thin space — a night when our reality, our ordinary world collides with another. We brush against the ether and stand in a liminal space filled with mischief and masques, eagerness and wonder. For Christians, at its best, the night is a celebration of life and imagination in the face of death, the porch light still on, an invitation breaking down the shadows and piercing through the dark. The revelry — the sugar, parades, silliness, the carved pumpkins — isn’t an embrace of evil or death but an act of courage, even defiance. A time to laugh at our fears and stare death in the face and ask for candy. All of it stands to remind us that joy and delight can coexist with sorrow and grief. We meander down streets with our children, quietly taking in elements of fear, acknowledging our mortality, and proclaiming (perhaps unconsciously) that joy persists. It remains. Even candy corn stands as a fructose-infused reminder that death does not have the final word.

Certainly, faith and grief might even be considered an act of the imagination, a muscle we build in donning costumes and pretending to be something else for a night. And today, we acknowledge the act of imagination the parents and families of Heaven’s 27 must now perform each day, waking up to a world without their girls in it. Most of us forget how close life and death live to one another, how they actually share the same fence line. The mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of those who died, heartbreakingly, cannot forget. We will strive not to.

And so, on this All Hallows’ Eve — the night before All Saints’ —  we remember the girls, and we remember that the veil between seen and unseen is not just thin with loss; it is also thin with mercy. The same veil through which sorrow passes is the one through which resurrection light leaks. As Sarah Condon reflected on a recent Mockingcast, “Jesus is in the business of meeting sadness head on.” Where there is suffering, there is God also.

And so tonight, as we zip up our children’s costumes and follow them down the street, marveling at their bodies and breaths, we again choose to trust that the love who went all the way into death itself — into the flood, into the darkness — has also met the girls. The story the girls occupy is not over and never will be. Nor is ours. The God who bore the weight of all horrors will one day transfigure our sorrows and sufferings into something eternally beautiful. That day is not today, but it will one day soon be.