Ancestors in faith, pray for us.

AS I WRITE THESE REFLECTIONS IT IS A BRIGHT, unusually crisp Feast of All Saints, a day of special solemnity here in New Orleans, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the United States. The remembrance of the dead, while a strong practice in traditional Catholic cultures, becomes (as would be expected) something quite different in the atmosphere of New Orleans. The descendants of the ancestors of this community are not Roman Catholic exclusively. This feast, naming those who have gone before as the saints of the locality, has as much to do with African American cultural appropriations as with Roman Catholic European devotional traditions.

One can study the various gathering rituals of Africans, both on the continent and in diaspora, and discover the unparalleled emphasis given to beginning every social ritual with homage dedicated to the ancestors. As that study would further reveal, for all traditional African cultures, the physically departed ancestors never really die as long as their names are known and recited in the community. This would imply to those possessed of a generous imagination that the theology of the communion of saints goes farther and wider than we might have suspected.

It is also a theology that seems to be receiving renewed attention today, especially in the black Catholic community, and that seems to be providing a way of centering many liturgical celebrations more concretely in the faith life of the local assemblies. Throughout the black Catholic Church in the United States, various liturgical celebrations gain their solemnity through the blending of gathering rites with celebrations of the ancestors. An even more widespread use of these rituals might restore a sense of solemnity to many parish and diocesan liturgies and at the same time respond positively to liturgical developments taking place across cultural divides.

Based on the example set by these black Catholic liturgies, I'd like to see the use of many forms and refrains and many adapted arrangements of old songs from the black spiritual and gospel tradition. Gathering rites and litanies of the ancestors should be developed for all of the sacramental rites of passage that are important to churches everywhere. Underpinning all of this should be a concerted effort to build a theology of ancestry in the faith that may be a corrective to so much of the fragmentation, divisiveness, and isolation experienced in our culture.

In many parishes with African American liturgies, the elderly are asked to join in prayerful reflections, remembering the ancestors of their faith and supplying some brief remark as to why these women and men should be remembered today. The youth of all of our churches could learn to devote much profitable time into investigating the lives of those who would be considered martyrs and doctors and holy women and men of God in our recent past. Each of us in the assembly could be asked to submit in writing (or to contribute during the ritual) the names of those who were the most shining examples of faith to us in our earliest memories. And all of us could be called to bring forth the names of those we could never join in earthly families but who join us at the table of the eternal sacrifice of praise.

Native American mystics and martyrs should be joined in our memories with the names of the Jesuit missionaries. The founders of religious orders of men and women devoted to the care of the sick, the elderly, the homeless, and the hopelessly ill should be linked in our litanies with the memories of those who thundered and cried for justice in the marketplaces, the courts, and the schools. In a time when cultural critics and educators repeatedly call for the example of role models for our young, should we not be exploring our own faith heritage for the names of the countless believers who did the will of God throughout the ages?

Could we not stand our children in the midst of the assembly, at Confirmation, at the beginning of each new school year, at their leave taking when they enter college, and at other times of transition and call upon the names and memories of those whom they should remember that the young be blessed and reminded of how others have successfully completed the journey of faith and family? Wandering in prayer through the hymnals "Lead Me, Guide Me" or "Songs of Zion" could yield a rich harvest of songs for the occasion of remembering and invocation.

And the circle would no longer be broken.