For All Souls

Yesterday was All Saints Day; today is All Souls Day. Of the two, I've always been partial to the latter. For one thing, it never required a visit to church, not being a "holy day of obligation." (There's a phrase and a practice that's on the way out!) For another, I figure that I know more souls than saints. Today is democratic: we pray for all those who have died.

But, expanding the meaning a bit, today can be a day of contemplation for the souls of all of us, the living, too, for the part of us that ripples beneath conscious thought, for our essence. "The soul is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food," said the abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. Today, for me, will be about feeding the soul.