The Christian holy-day All Saints is really a pre-Christian (pagan) holiday reclaimed. Shocking! Say it isn’t true! The truth is most pre-Christian holidays morphed into reclaimed Christian holy-days. My favorite is All Saints. Traditionally pagans celebrated a day called Samhain, what we typically call “All Hollows Eve” or Halloween. Samhain was the beginning of the New Year and on the eve of the coming year it was believed that the veil between life and death, this life and the next, was thin.

I have some Pagan friends.* I love them. Their traditions inform and challenge mine. Recently during Samhain I asked them to listen for my Baba. Yes, an ordained minister asked her “witch” friends to keep an eye out for my former babysitter Dorthy Sponholz who I lovingly called Baba.

And then without any trouble I led an All Saints Day Christian gathering and preached about my pagan friends’ very real connections to the dead. It was a beautiful gathering during which we honestly laid our thanksgiving filled grief before one another in community. Again: Shocking! Pagan and Christian practices mingle. Call the Orthodox Police!

I would like to think we have come a long way from the days when “Christians” use to burn their pagan neighbors at the stake.

Too often people believe that saints are some or all of the following: famous, martyred, miracle performers, extremely pious to the point of weird, dressed in long robes and huge crosses. Wrong. Saints are the very real and ordinary people in our lives who simply loved us to God and then died. Some saints are famous. But most are not. My beloved Saint Baba was not an extraordinary person. In fact, she was simple. But her simple love transformed me.

Saints are no different from the spirits Pagans connect with to this day on the eve of Samhain. They are the dead who are inexplicably with us. How we understand this “with us” is debatable, but to me insignificant. This All Saints Day my dear friends helped me understand that I did not need them to connect me with my beloved Baba. Instead, I was already connected to her. I have always been in communication with Baba through what I call prayer since her death 25 years ago. I just didn’t know it because my Christian forbearers were trying to hide their pagan roots. My religious leaders didn’t let me know how close the living and the dead mingle, probably because they had no idea themselves.

In remembrance of All Saints Day, in thanksgiving for my dear pagan friends, and in celebration of all the ordinary saints and their transformative love I would like to tell you my favorite Baba story.

One morning my mother dropped me off early to Baba’s house; she had a meeting. Baba fed me breakfast at her Formica kitchen table and then it was time to catch the bus. It was pouring. I put on my rain jacket, but even my hood could not keep the rain from pouring down my neck. Instead of waiting at the edge of Baba’s driveway, I ran back to Baba’s porch. When the bus came it did not see me and passed by, leaving me with no ride to school. Drenched, I walked back into Baba’s house, afraid she might be angry. I confessed I had missed the bus.

I now know this was one of my best mistakes for it turned into a great adventure. Baba didn’t want to wake her husband Carl. She decided she would drive me to school.

Baba hadn’t driven in 15 years. Her husband Carl did all the driving in their old brown station wagon. I was a bit scared when Baba put on her coat and boots and tied a plastic bag around her recently set short curls. We hurried to the safety of the brown wagon and Baba started her up. I sat beside her in the front seat, watching the road intently, certain Baba needed my pair of eyes. The wipers could not keep up with the deluge of water. Baba and I were silent for a moment as she pulled out and started down the road, the squeak of the wipers the only sound in the deafening rainfall. And then Baba laughed. I don’t know the last time I’ve drove! The car feels so heavy. Was that a bad thing I asked? No, no. I just don’t remember it being so heavy. And then she laughed some more.

On the rest of that adventuresome ride to my elementary school, I was aware that I was the only person Baba would drive for. I was the one Baba loved best. The love present in that rainy morning 29 years ago sustains me today.

Remember your ordinary saint and bask in their love this day.

*I had a long discussion on just what to call my friends. One is druidic, the other earth centered, the other a hearth witch. Just as Christianity is diverse so are the practices of the many folks who practice ancient pre-Christian religions. I have chosen to use the term Pagan 1) because I am not using it in a derogatory way 2) because there seems no single unifying term 3) because then my readers will know what I am talking about! If you at all are offended by my use of the word Pagan, please don’t be. Instead send me a comment to tell me which word you think I should use. Thank you.

I love Christmas. I HATE the holidays. Why? Christmas is a sacred, mysterious, and even a wonderfully cozy time. The “Holidays” is a terrifying consumer driven shop until you drop frenzy. My life is frantic enough. I hate shopping. I don’t have a large cash flow. Of course I hate the Holidays.

I use to try to boycott the holidays. I would shut out all of the consumer bling. It didn’t work. I still wanted to buy gifts for a dear friend, my new godson. I even wanted to buy the holiday pump soap that smelled of ginger bread. It’s difficult to shut out the holiday bling machine.

I have sought out alternative consumerism to resist the bling machine. What is that? SERRV.org, local markets, used goods (try your local Salvation Army or Good Will store), Heifer Project, Unicef, and well any environmentally conscious, small, local entrepreneur.

@Grace we are offering an alternative to Holiday consumerism Nov 23rd. Celebrate Christmas with us. Ignore the holidays. Use the money you have for good to support fair trade across the global and local trade right in your backyard. 

Tomorrow my firstborn turns ten. Make my heart ache double digits.

I was the high schooler who babysat five children without missing a beat, the college student who left campus to tutor elementary school children and babysit professor’s newborns, the young adult who thought of nothing else but when I could start my family. There was nothing shocking about the arrival of my first born; everyone was waiting for me to become a mother. What was shocking was how much I hated it.

Yes, I hated it. I spent the first ten weeks of my son’s life in a sleepless regret, wondering: what have I done? I had ruined my perfectly lovely and controlled life with a wholly dependent child who nursed around the clock, had no apparent emotional connection to me, and kept me from doing everything I had previously enjoyed, like sleeping. I now know many mothers and fathers experience the same exhausted disenchantment with new parenthood. I give permission to every expectant mother I meet to not love parenthood, or even their child, during those first weeks.

So why on the eve of my boy’s tenth birthday am I remembering those long first weeks?

I am the woman who craves another child, yet shudders at the thought of caring for a newborn. I am the woman whose heart longs for the baby who will be ten tomorrow, yet eagerly looks forward to the next ten years observing his life unfold. I am the woman who has discovered nothing more difficult, yet more life-giving and transformative than parenthood. I can find no explanation for these paradoxes other than God.

Remembering my rocky arrival to parenthood while my beloved ten-year-old boy sleeps upstairs speaks to the sacred journeys to which God calls us.

God called me to parenthood. Yet what I did not know as a babysitting teenager and pregnant 27 year old was that God was calling me to a knock you on your knees difficult journey that would transform how I saw the world and how I saw myself. If you had told me this as I nursed my four day old baby after three days of labor (that would be seven days without sleep for those of you who aren’t counting), I might have thrown my La Leche League book at you. But as a woman who survived that early journey, and in the meantime has had her heart filled beyond a capacity she knew possible, I can only pause and wonder how God can be so sneaky.

Yes sneaky. God is sneaky like a parent who washes your blanket behind your back and returns it before bed. Or like a high school teacher who you are dead set on hating due to their demanding work load, but ends up earning your life-long thanks. Or like a rainy day that ends with a brilliant sun set.  

God called me to parenthood without letting me know how fully it would crack me open to the wonder, pain, and sheer difficulty of life. On the eve of my boy’s birthday I give thanks to God not just for my boy, but also for the difficult and utterly beautiful journey that has brought me here. I also give thanks to God for the sneaky ways we are called to the journeys before us.