Second only to Mardi Gras in my father’s estimation was Halloween. I vividly remember the year Daddy decorated our living room as a haunted house – red light bulbs in the lamps, the furniture draped in white sheets, the walls festooned with Spanish moss, and a bowl prepared with cold cooked spaghetti to be “worms.” (I’ll never know how my mother agreed to all this.)

My father went to the mask store in the French Quarter and returned with a gruesome rubber head to pull over his own handsome one, and he retrieved an old felt hat from the attic to top off his look. Then he sat himself in the armchair in the corner of the living room, holding the Halloween candy bowl in his lap.

Somehow, he recruited my mother’s mother into this production. As the trick-or-treaters rang our doorbell and sang out their familiar call that Halloween night, my grandmother would swing the front door open and point toward my father in the scarlet dark. “There’s the candy,” she would intone in this sepulchral voice. Only the bravest and nerviest neighborhood children got candy at our house that night, most opting instead to cut and run. Afterwards, we his children were quite proud of what our father had wrought: we had an abundance of leftover candy in the house, and had gained quite a local reputation. (My dad never repeated that bravura performance – we always suspected that Mama had put her foot down.)

For me, growing up in New Orleans, the connection between trick-or-treating on Halloween night and visiting the cemeteries for All Saints the next day was normal, just life as it was. I have so many childhood memories of going to clean and decorate the family tomb in St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery No. 1 on November 1st – I remember the crowds, how it was difficult to park, and all the talking and visiting back and forth, the smells of hot peanuts and hot dogs and cotton candy sold by the vendors just out-side the cemetery gates, the bright flowers and ribbons. In my memory, the sun is always shining brightly on All Saints Day.

Years later, the ritual was reinforced for a new generation, as my son and I accompanied my father to the Morel family tomb, to brush it clean and leave a fresh pot of chrysanthemums, which in New Orleans are thought of as the flowers of the dead. The visit always triggered a fresh spate of memories in my father, and Stevie and I would listen raptly as Daddy would retell the old stories. After my father’s death in 1991, Stephen and I made the pilgrimage by ourselves, and told each other the stories. We always felt his presence as we stood before the tomb that held the bones of Stephen’s great-grandparents.

You may wonder why the city of New Orleans honors all the dead on November 1st, All Saints Day, instead of All Souls Day on November 2nd, as is the custom in most other Roman Catholic places. I’ve often wondered that myself, and I have several theories. New Orleans is essentially a pagan city, despite the veneer of French Catholicism, and perhaps the old pre-Christian belief that all the dead walk the earth on the night October 31st survives in the All Saints Day custom. New Orleans was also a Spanish city, with strong connections to Cuba, so perhaps All Saints is a remnant of the Dias de Los Muertes, or Day of the Dead still celebrated in Latin countries.

The explanation I like best, though, is that the people of New Orleans somehow developed their own cosmopolitan universalist theology, believing, like our religious ancestors, that everyone who dies becomes a saint, that everyone is saved, that if there is a Heaven, it is a party that everyone gets to go to. (It is not for nothing that the Crescent City’s professional football team is called the “Saints.”)

Our forebears the early Universalists were people who studied their Bibles and came to the conclusion that the loving Father taught by Jesus could never disown or discard any of his children. They believed that at the end of time all souls would be reconciled with God; early church father Bishop Origen taught that at the end time even Satan would be readmitted to Heaven. The importance of the doctrine of universal salvation was such that many Universalist congregations took the name All Souls, to distinguish themselves from those churches that taught that only a select few, the elect, would be allowed into Heaven. Even today, two of the largest congregations in our movement proudly bear the name All Souls.

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has a strict procedure for officially declaring a person a saint. First, they have to be dead, and second, they have to have been Catholic. Third, it must be shown that their life was without serious blemish or flaw – or if there was a serious character defect, that they successfully and completely overcame it. (For example, both St. Anthony and St. Fran-is were carousers and womanizers in their youth, but be-came tee totaling ascetic celibates in their later years.) Fourth and finally, there must be documented bona fide, no-natural-or-scientific-explanation-possible miracles ascribed to the person.

We Unitarian Universalists have a completely different notion of “sainthood.” We think living persons might be called saints, if their behavior warrants it. We don’t think we have to wait until good people die to appreciate them and thank them for being saints of liberal religion. With our long history of acknowledging the weaknesses as well as the strengths of human nature, we do not require that our saints be perfect or without flaw. We recognize that goodness in the world is personified in flawed and error-prone humanity -- and we give thanks, knowing all too well our own tendency to sometimes do the wrong thing.

Why, we Unitarian Universalists don’t even limit our pantheon of saints to those known to be of our faith tradition. We’re liable to reach back and grab and folks we ad-mire from history to the present day, and declare that they were “closet UUs” or “Unitarian Universalist in their thinking.” (Back in the 1960s and 1970s, many UU Sunday School children were told that the Egyptian pharaoh Ankhenaten was the first Unitarian, because he was mono-theist!)

And we UUs have a different perspective on miracles too. We don’t think a miracle has to be supernatural or break the laws of science – we know that there are times when being loving and compassionate in a hurting and broken world is a miracle, when working when you want to give up is a miracle, when extending yourself for justice and peace when all around you scream for revenge and war is a kind of miracle. We revere as saints those courageous and hopeful women and men throughout history whose words and deeds inspire us to step forward to re-make the world in our time and in our place. To us, what makes a saint are the simply, ordinary, human acts of con-science, integrity, responsibility, and dedication.

Our Universalist heritage, 210 years young in 2002, wisely and rightly informs us that all souls are precious – hungry and full, female and male and transgendered, young and old and in-between, gay and straight and bi-sexual, black and white and brown and yellow and red, living and dead, remembered and unremembered. The God of our Universalist ancestors, the loving and forgiving God of universal salvation, asks not that we determine an individual’s worth or value and that we determine who has earned a place at the table. All are God’s children, and we are all one family. All souls are worthy, all souls have value, all souls have a place. We current-day Unitarian Universalists do not bother ourselves with questions of belief or creed or doctrine, but take our cue from the Universalists of old, and from the inclusive celebratory spirit of my hometown of New Orleans with their native universalism: all souls, all people are our concern. Every-one can be a saint. Beliefs don’t matter, whether or not one belongs to or attends a church doesn’t matter – all that matters is that we strive to live lives of wholeness and integrity and that we do our best to leave the world better than we found it.

In honoring those we love who have gone before us in death, in celebrating the lives and deeds of the “saints” of our free church tradition, we acknowledge an important truth. Taking care of our own is not what gives human life meaning – that can be said of most mammals. What makes us fully and deeply human are the actions that take us outside ourselves, that empower the powerless, free the oppressed, nurture the starving, shelter the homeless, and clothe the naked. That’s what makes a Unitarian Universalist saint.

Birago Dirop’s poem reminds us that “The dead have a pact with the living.” We stand on the accomplishments of the people of the past, the immediate past and the far distant past, those known to us by name and those lost to time and history. The best way to honor our covenant with them is to live our lives in ways that will prompt future generation to rise up and call out our names at the Feast of All Saints and All Souls.
May it be said of us by those who will come after us that we saw what needed doing and we did our best to do it. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

Copyrighted 2002, Melanie Morel Sullivan. This material may be used by other Unitarian Universalist churches with attribution to the author and the Unitarian Universalist Church in Cherry Hill. Commercial distribution is prohibited.