All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are woven into the rhythm of our lives-deeply spiritual, even mystical, yet ordinary and material, like cold tombstone marble carefully cleaned by human hands in the ever-darkening autumn days. There is something else that matters during these days – a communal, national experience: the charity collections at the Old Powązki Cemetery, our necropolises in Vilnius and Lviv lit by the glow of candles and collective memory; the crowds at rural and small-town graveyards. Polish cemeteries in November, illuminated by hundreds and thousands of candle flames, are perhaps one of the last communal, Christian, spiritual lessons for Europe.
As Dominican friar Jan Tauler preached centuries ago on All Saints’ Day, “As we today celebrate the day of pure souls, so tomorrow we shall pray for those stained by sin, that they may be purified.” This is the shortest and clearest exposition of Catholic teaching on the communion of saints – on the Church that is pilgrim and militant, the Church that suffers in purgatory for sins, and the Church of the saved, triumphant with God.
All Saints’ Day – the promise of resurrection
All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day complement each other. Even today, when faith has weakened, Poles intuitively grasp the unity of these days. Prayer for the dead, however brief, is a sign of an unextinguished spiritual intuition of the most essential truths of faith – and of our most intimate existential longings.
This experience is profoundly Christian – not without reason did the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his own time of tragedy, write: “Socrates proved to be a master in the art of dying; Christ conquered death as the last enemy. That is the real difference between these two matters. The first lies within human capacity; the second presupposes resurrection. To strengthen and purify today’s world, we do not need ars moriendi [the art of dying – K.W.], but the resurrection of Jesus” (Letters and Papers from Prison). Both All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day draw hope from the same divine promise, unimaginable to our minds, beyond the grasp of our senses: the resurrection of humankind.
“The homeland is the land and the graves”
But that is not all – the spiritual dimension intertwines with the profoundly human. After all, Polish cemeteries in November, glowing with the lights of hundreds and thousands of candles, are perhaps one of the last communal, Christian, spiritual lessons for Europe. It is no wonder that visitors from Western countries who, together with their Polish spouses and families, visit our cemeteries on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, gaze around in astonishment. The surprise on their faces speaks of a miracle with which we have become familiar – the miracle of shared remembrance of our ancestors, the miracle of comfort that overcomes suffering, grief, and the bitterest tears of loss. Cemetery crosses lose their sepulchral chill, warmed by the colors of autumn, by human breath and kind words.
Today, when we so often hear that we are threatened by extreme atomization, that future generations of Poles face great loneliness – let us not forget All Saints’ Day, let us cherish the community of All Souls’.
In Zakopane, I prefer walking through the cemetery at Pęksowy Brzyzek to strolling along Krupówki. I always stop at the gate to read the well-known words: “The homeland is the land and the graves. Nations that lose their memory lose their life.” Among many famous graves, there is the symbolic resting place of one of pre-war Polish generals, Mariusz Zaruski – tracked down by the NKVD in Lviv in 1940 and soon killed by the Soviets. Standing with bowed head at Pęksowy Brzyzek, I also think of other Polish necropolises – the Old Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw, the cemetery on the hill in Vilnius, known as Rossa, and the Lviv Cemetery of the Eaglets. I once stood there, moved by the proud simplicity of the Latin words: “Mortui sunt ut liberi vivamus” (“They died so that we might live free”); raised in Greater Poland, I lit a candle with devotion at the grave of Maria Konopnicka in the Łyczakowski Cemetery.
Polishness and Dziady
These are signs of our national, historical, and cultural unity – also signs of defiance against foreign domination – binding Polishness together like the arms of a cross, East and West. It is a Polishness that cannot be uprooted, whose soul cannot be killed by a bullet to the back of the head; whose language cannot be silenced by a death rag stuffed into the mouth; whose greatness cannot be buried in an unmarked grave.
At the beginning of November, in Poland and beyond its borders, candles will be lit at many cemeteries and memorial sites. They will commemorate the January insurgents and the miners from the Wujek coal mine; they will honor the victims of the Smolensk tragedy and those murdered in death pits by the Germans. They will flicker like prayers upon the magnificent graves of great Polish men and women – and on the forgotten tombs of small-town activists of the first Solidarity movement.
Cemeteries full of autumn colors, flowers like a living shroud, and candle flames flickering in the wind. The bustle of scouts, pious sighs, and quiet family gossip; the first unhealed grief by a fresh grave, completing the first and only love; folk-style, modern Dziady with something stronger tucked in their coats beside a barely cleaned grave; the splendor of golden letters and marble, angels with stone stumps for hands, the solemn faces of charity collectors. All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day – Polish and heavenly matters, both earthly and divine.