• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Mothering Spirit

everyday parenting as spiritual practice

  • About
    • About Laura
    • New Here?
    • Popular Posts
    • Contact Me
    • Privacy Policy
    • Insta-Links
    • My Newsletter
  • My Books
    • Grieving Together: A Couple’s Journey through Miscarriage
    • Prayers for Pregnancy & Birth
    • Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting
    • To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation
    • Living Your Discipleship: 7 Ways to Express Your Deepest Calling
    • Little Rock Scripture Studies
  • After Loss
    • what to do when a friend loses a baby
    • what to do for kids when their sibling dies
  • prayers for pregnancy
    • The Complete E-Books
    • Trying to Conceive
    • Month One
    • Month Two
    • Month Three
    • Month Four
    • Month Five
    • Month Six
    • Month Seven
    • Month Eight
    • Month Nine
    • Infertility
    • Miscarriage
    • Morning Sickness
  • Prayers for Parenting
  • For You
    • favorite resources for parents
    • faith resources for ministers
  • Show Search
Hide Search

for all our souls

3 Comments

We are the weird ones.

We sign names of the dead on Christmas cards. We hang their photos on our walls. We count them in our family when strangers ask at the grocery store. We tattoo their memory on our skin.

We know you may think this is strange. We are trying to tell you a secret. It is the truth we learned the hardest way. It is the other side that changed everything we knew.

And today is one of our handful of holy days.

 
Today in the Catholic Church we remember the faithful departed. Which is a fancy way of saying God’s beloved. All the souls that came from God and returned to God, changing lives in whatever span of time they passed through this earth of here and now.

All Souls’ Day is the quiet cousin to All Saints, the overlooked neighbor next to the feast of fanfare. Almost an afterthought – if it did not hold the secret to everything.

Which is that we hold within us the promise of eternity. The truth is so quiet that noise clamors to drown it out and despair threatens to destroy it. But this is what a soul means.

Spoiler alert: we all die. Plot twist: we still live.

This is the secret we know. We try to tell you if we feel brave enough, hard as we know it is to hear. And the secret is not about death. It is about life. We know in our bones that existence is bigger than this – bigger than time, bigger than bodies, bigger than anything seen, touched, heard, or known.

The ones we loved are still alive.

. . .

Last week marked eight months since our twin daughters lived and died. As we walked through the days of remembering, I pulled out their photo album. This time, when I looked at Abby and Maggie’s pictures, my first thought was quiet surprise: this is not the fullness of them. 

I know my daughters differently now than when I carried them within me or held them in my arms. Their souls are bigger than the beauty of their tiny bodies. Their lingering presence in our lives – and in the lives of so many others, friends and strangers and readers across oceans – has bloomed into fullness, beckoning us beyond grief into a life that I never imagined.

Eternal is here and there. Changed, but not ended.

This is what today celebrates: that love and life are not destroyed by death. Our souls go beyond. What we carry within us returns to God.

. . .

All Saints and All Souls are thin places on the calendar, arriving each year as light fades and days shorten, leaves fall and gardens shrivel. Frost paints icy death on the grass each morning, and wind carries whispers of cold.

We need to remember, now more than ever, that the veil between here and heaven is thin.

I remember this thinness whenever I walk through the cemetery. I let the kids wander to the far edges, out of sight, without worry. Somehow they feel safer here, in a space unafraid to bear witness to mortality and fragility.

Here we can talk about death freely. It is normal and natural. We are not the weird ones. The children sense this freedom. They are unafraid here, too. The quiet beauty of love’s ground holds us, strong and steady.


Today is for all our souls: we who remember and they who have returned.

It is a day about death, and it is a day about hope. A day to be unafraid to speak of the dead and what they have taught us. A day to imagine where our souls will go next, too.

“They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace.”
(Wisdom 3:2-3)

Share this:

  • Share
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Related

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Kaitlyn Mason says

    3 November 2016 at 1:28 pm

    Thank you for sharing these beautiful words and your beautiful heart here. I know without a shadow of a doubt with all my mind, heart, soul, and strength that Heaven is SO REAL. It is more real than the boards on my back deck. And we are all united in Christ – that is the Heaven that touches down on earth here and now. Not only in the Mass, but in the everyday ordinary – whether we can see it with our eyes, or just feel it with our souls. Have a wonderful day and God bless! Peace!

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. This Week’s Miscellany: Vol. 162 (DC Edition!) says:
    4 November 2016 at 6:07 pm

    […] And this beautiful one from my friend Laura: for all the souls […]

    Reply
  2. Online Daybook / 7 QT (11/15/16): Saints, Voting and Fave Links | Revolution of Love says:
    15 November 2016 at 2:52 pm

    […] For Our Souls by Mothering Spirit.com […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

About Laura

I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

Follow Laura

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
Laura Kelly Fanucci
Books by Laura Kelly Fanucci
e-books by Laura Kelly Fanucci

Mothering Spirit Newsletter

Henri Nouwen quote

From the Archives

Footer

Follow Me on Facebook

Follow Me on Facebook

Follow me on Twitter

Tweets by laurakfanucci

Follow Me on Instagram

thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
Since June is a month for graduations & celebrations, I’m delighted to help you celebrate with @grottonetwork .

Grotto Network shares stories about life, work, faith, relationships, and more. Check out their videos, podcast, and articles to help you reflect on where you are in your journey.
 
Grotto Network has generously given 2-$100 gift cards to Bloomin’ Brands Restaurants (Outback, Carrabba’s, Bonefish Grill & more) to help you celebrate this month with friends & family! It’s a huge giveaway, because we all need to savor and celebrate whatever joy we can find these days.
 
To enter the giveaway, follow @grottonetwork and @thismessygrace and leave a comment below about what you’re celebrating this month. Tag a friend for extra entries (up to 3).
 
Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
Load More... Follow Laura on Instagram

Copyright © 2022 Laura Kelly Fanucci · site customizations by Jamie Jorczak

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please click "accept" to keep reading. You can opt-out if you wish.Accept Reject Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT