A Transition
As an old and weary year makes way for something new, Fort Cochin celebrates on the beach.
Happy crowds assemble.
Police, in high-profile but good humour, watch over events.
Fireworks, friendship, cameras, laughter, singing, and even space-restricted dancing, all play their parts.
The previous year’s “Santa Claus” is set alight:
a custom I have seen nowhere else!
Then, as the final fireworks die, an excited but tired crowd quietly fades,
like ghosts of the recently departed year.
This celebration of memories, hopes and dreams is over.
Happy New Year!
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Pictures taken on Fort Cochin Beach at midnight, New Year’s Eve.
All Souls Day
Today is the Feast of All Souls:
The Church remembers “the faithful departed”.
Yesterday, All Saints (All Hallows) was celebrated – a far greater solemnity in the Church’s year.
But All Souls always draws the bigger crowd.
For it touches people’s hearts.
All Souls speaks of ordinary lives.
Of failure, suffering, brokenness and death.
It does not shy away from their centrality to us all.
And this acknowledgement often resonates more deeply than celebrations of success.
We may aspire to great happiness
But we will almost certainly know grief.
The Feast of All Souls points to the inevitability of own death and, more terribly, the death of all those we love.
But it also dares to point hesitantly through grief and brokenness.
All Souls looks at ordinary people, with ordinary lives, and speaks of hope.
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Picture taken on the Feast of All Souls, Holy Cross Basilica, Fort Cochin.
“The Day of the Dead” painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 – 1905). Taken from the web.
Neither Use Nor Ornament 