A couple of weeks ago, Laurent invited the family to come downtown to the Basilica for the All Souls Day celebration – mass, followed by the annual Día de los Muertos street festival. We were all excited to have a chance to attend, having only seen photos after the fact in previous years.
First let me say, this is the kind of thing that, as a protestant, would have given me the heebie-jeebies. I didn’t have a clue about what was really happening, and from a distance, it looks like “pagan” rituals, especially with all the skulls and face painting and shrines and whatnot. But now I’ve had a chance to sit for a few years with the concepts of the communion of the saints, memento mori, and purgatory; I’ve had first one father, and then another leave this earth, and then my mother after that, and things gradually began to make sense as I looked at these practices of loving remembrance.
Today, the whole mass was incredibly moving, even just the chance to absorb the beauty of the Basilica, and feel in a very visible and tangible way the presence of the “great cloud of witnesses” with which we are surrounded, represented in the gorgeous stained glass windows and statuary. But then, Father Camou gave maybe the best All Souls Day homily I’ve heard, and I wanted to share it with you. I hope it helps you, too. (The homily runs until around minute 34:26, but if you stick around you can listen to the wonderful Basilica choir singing Libera Me from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, Op.48.)
After the mass, I wanted to wait around a little while to let the full house empty out a little bit and then get some photos. You can get a sense of the beauty with which we were surrounded!
After that we rolled down the long winding ramp to the plaza where there were many booths set up, and a large ofrenda where anyone was invited to display photos of departed loved ones. Laurent and I had mis-communicated – I got photos printed, and thought she took them to set on the shrine, but she had left them in my purse when we left Walgreens on Saturday night, so I didn’t get a chance to include them. But I can of course just set them up here at home, too. Anyway, the festival officially started at 11am, and we had gotten out of the mass around 10:15 so all my photos are just what was going on before the crowds really began to arrive. We couldn’t stay too long because we were planning to go to Grandma’s this afternoon, but I was glad we could get a little taste of what it was like. I know that when things really got going they were going to have live music playing for much of the afternoon, and of course face painting and juggling and all kinds of fun. Next year my hope is to come later in the afternoon and really get the full experience!
