Yesterday was All Saint's or All Hallows Day – a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic church. It is not an excuse for cadging candy off neighbours or dressing up, but instead there is an obligation for all Catholics to attend Mass and revere the saints throughout history who have reached Heaven, both those known and those not yet known. It is a public holiday in some countries and in Mexico coincides with the 1st Day of the Dead, which commemorates children who have died. The 2nd day on November 2nd remembers all deceased adults. These celebrations are less solemn and are more a day of celebration than mourning. People gather together to remember family and friends. They share chocolate and sugar skulls, tell anecdotes about the departed and even write short rhyming poems called calaveras literarias (literary skulls) mocking departed friends, family members and also public and historical figures.
Today is All Soul's Day. Not a public holiday nor a church holiday, but a chance for Christians to remember and pray for the souls of those in Purgatory – a sort of waiting room for Heaven, where members of The Church who died before atoning for minor sins must mark time before entrance to Heaven.
At this time of the year, some people take the opportunity to check out their relatives' graves, perhaps do a bit of weeding and tidying up, lay some flowers. In some cultures it is customary to have a quiet word and update ancestors with family news. But from the look of many graveyards, the tidying of graves is not that popular. People may tend a grave for the first few years after a death, but then, gradually, this tails off. Some churchyards have a group of volunteers who take on the responsibility of keeping the area around the church neat and well-tended, but they do not have the resources to care for every grave. As one who hangs around churchyards on a regular basis, it is notable which ones appear neglected and which give the impression that someone is making an effort .
But social media may be about to change that – at least for a brief season while it is "trending". #gravetok, on TikTok, has more than 750million views of people who clean and restore neglected gravestones. Apparently, the grave cleaning activities began during the COVID lockdowns. Perhaps people had more time on their hands, perhaps grave-tending was a "permitted " activity for those desperate to get out of the house, perhaps the contemplation of our mortality become unavoidable. Whatever the reason, individuals took to cleaning graves and posting videos of themselves doing it. Not instructional videos on how to remove stubborn marks from marble, but just videos of the activity. I do hope that people check before using chemicals on headstones, because there is no point in cleaning something and damaging the surface in the process. Some videos appear to show people using scrubbing brushes rather than gentle sponging which is worrying.
It seems that watching people clean things of a non-funeary nature is also popular, as is watching people opening boxes/wrapping parcels/eating pizza/playing board games/ de-linting their jumpers etc . I was bemused by my grandchildren who came to stay recently. I allowed them very limited screen time and they chose to spend the precious 30 minutes watching hyper-active young men playing video games and trying to flog them stuff rather than either playing the games themselves (surely preferable to enjoying them second-hand?) or watching a carefully constructed programme that would both entertain and educate. What do I know? It seems watching people doing banal stuff is to be preferred to participating in life. In the end, I banned Youtube (wicked grandma) and instead they went out and played in the garden because they decided that regular channels were too boring to bother with.
Of course we could all watch #gravetok, or perhaps we could do the equivalent of going out in to the garden and actually joining in. We could volunteer to help our local church look after graves that have no-one caring for them. We have regular working parties at our church and those that help are not necessarily members of the congregation. They enjoy a few hours community gardening and appreciate that we are maintaining a precious village resource, God's Acre, where all are welcome to visit and wildlife and bio-diversity are encouraged.
The Church of England has begun a 7 year-year project, The National Burial Grounds Survey, to launch a free website recording every memorial in England's 19,000 Anglican chcurchyards. If you hate gardening, perhaps you could help with that? At Reedham we did the work of recording all the memorials some years ago, which was fortunate because inscriptions are fast disappearing from headstones. Unfortunately they were only able to go back to the 19th century so any memorials to my ancestors, who I know were buried in the churchyard in the 18th century, have been forever lost.
Perhaps the practical gesture of caring for the graves of our forbears will become more popular, and thereby we will restore the link between the dead and the living, something that modern culture often shies away from. Or perhaps, like so many other trends, people will get bored and move on to the next exciting thing.- watching other people clean their bathrooms perhaps?
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