By Rep. Arthur C. Yap
Every Undas, Boholanos head to the cemetery on November 1 and stay through November 2. Most of us treat the two days as one long family reunion among the tombs. But they are two different feasts, and each one carries a story worth telling our children.
November 1 is All Saints’ Day. It celebrates everyone who is already in heaven. November 2 is All Souls’ Day. It is for praying for our dead who are not there yet. On the first day we celebrate. On the second we pray.
A Visayan boy in heaven
In 1672, on the island of Guam, a teenage catechist from the Visayas named Pedro Calungsod was walking with a Spanish missionary, Fr. Diego Luis de San Vitores. A village chief, furious that the priest had baptized his baby daughter, came after them with spears. Pedro was young and quick, and the accounts say he could have run. He stayed beside the priest instead. Both were killed. Pedro was about seventeen.
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared him a saint. That is what All Saints’ Day is about. Saints are not plaster statues. They are people like Pedro: young, poor, far from home, who stayed faithful when it counted. And the feast is not only for the famous ones. Heaven is full of saints no pope ever named: the lola who prayed the rosary every afternoon, the farmer who never cheated a neighbor. On November 1 we thank God for them and ask them to pray for us.
A mother’s last request
In the year 387, in a port town near Rome, a mother lay dying. Her son was a brilliant teacher who had spent years running from God before finally coming home to the faith. Her name was Monica. His name was Augustine, who would become one of the greatest saints of the Church.
Her family fretted about burying her so far from home in Africa. She told them not to worry. Lay my body anywhere, she said. Just remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you are.
Augustine wrote that scene down in his Confessions, and Christians have done what Sta. Monica asked ever since. That is All Souls’ Day. The Church teaches that many who die in God’s friendship still need a final cleansing before they see Him. We call it purgatory. Our prayers and Masses help them along. Love does not stop at the grave.
A monk turned that old habit into a fixed date. Around the year 998, St. Odilo, abbot of the great monastery of Cluny in France, ordered his monks to pray for all the dead on the day after All Saints. The custom spread across Europe and, in time, all the way to Bohol.
Why one after the other
The order is the lesson. First we look at the finish line, at people like Pedro who made it home. Then we turn around and help those still on the road. Hope first, then help.
Years in public life have taught me that titles do not follow us into the grave. What follows us is how we loved others and whether someone remembers to pray for us after we have left this world.
So this Undas, do both. Tell your children about Pedro, a Visayan boy not much older than they are. Then, at the tomb, pray for your dead by name. If you can, have a Mass offered for them.
The first day tells us where we are going. The second reminds us that no one gets there alone.
