On the 1st of November most Christians in churches closer to the Catholic Church will be keeping All Saints Day. This is in contrast to the pagan feasts and other reasons for parties falling on the 31st of October, going under the name of Halloween.
I’ll be in Brisbane on Halloween and flying from Australia to South Africa on All Saints Day. It is about the context of All Saints Day (ASD) that I want to talk in this blog. Thinking about the context of ASD, I suddenly thought about my grandmother. Born just after the turn of the previous century, she saw both world wars and raised 5 children under very difficult circumstances in South Africa. It was a time of colonial rule of most of Africa, and she and her children were called names and ridiculed for speaking Afrikaans (a descendent language of Dutch). Discrimination against Afrikaners like my grandmother was not recognised for what it was by the world at the time - racial and cultural discrimination of the worst kind. One wonders how this contributed to the nationalist dreams of people like my grandmother and her children, and how it contributed to them being ready to be exploited by politicians during the Apartheid Era.
But these things mean nothing when compared to the thing she did well. She had a secret recipe for a South African delicacy called a “koeksister” and here grape jam was beyond belief on warm toast, made by toasting bread directly on warm stove plates on those eye-watering cold winter nights in Kimberley. She was not an easy woman to get along with, but she had a simple approach to life: always speak the truth and keep things simple.
She prayed a lot and in later years when we spoke on the phone (we would call her once a week) she would often say that she has so many people to remember in her prayers that she often fell asleep during these prayers. She would quickly add that she always had us up front in the queue, so we would be ok!
She was an active woman her whole life and she had a coloured young woman living with her in the house, and when this lady’s son was born, he stayed with my grandmother, often sleeping with her in her bed after falling asleep after a long day and a great bedtime story. She always said that he was her reason for waking up! On the day she died, she got up in the morning, at age 94 and still readied herself for shopping. She walked a couple of kilometers to the shops, did not feel well and went past her doctor, who immediately had her taken to hospital. When the family reached the hospital, she was calm and collected, and with a clear voice gave them the instructions on where the koeksisters were, where the frozen meatballs were, etc. She had prepared everything in detail for her funeral and the family get-together as is the custom. And with clear eyes and a smile, she asked that we let her go and she passed on.
There was a feeling of immense loss but also of great peace when I was told of her death. I knew that from that moment on one less person was praying for my well-being. There would also not be anymore koeksisters and grape jam on toast dripping with butter. But most of all, we have lost a person of great serenity, of simple and straight-forward values and a person with wisdom of almost a 100 years locked up in every sentence.
Tomorrow on the plane I’ll be remembering her on All Saints Day, for all the right reasons. I know we all have people to be remembered on this day. Go ahead, let’s be grateful. Being touched by these people gives us direction. And maybe, it shows us the way so that we can become saints in our own way.
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