c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Millions of Americans once again will rub their eyes open on Saturday, All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), with a sugar-induced hangover from the night before. More and more, the observance of Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve) has become an exercise in hedonism for those on the threshold of adulthood.

Americans turned off by the commercialization and self-indulgence of Oct. 31 might welcome the more spiritual approach in Eastern Europe and other parts of what use to be the Soviet Union that follows on Nov. 1 and 2.

In Poland, even the Grim Reaper leaves death’s door slightly ajar on All Saints’ Day, a time when millions of Poles reflect on that greatest of all finalities by honoring dead fathers, mothers, children, siblings, soldiers and statesmen, composers, professors and others from all walks of life.

All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2, are both national holidays in Poland. Everything comes to a complete stop. Trams and buses still run, but only, it seems, to ferry the multitude to cemeteries where ancient rituals are observed: the placing of flowers on graves and the lighting of candles that blaze away inside colored glass jars, emitting a soft glow of spirituality.

The Poles linger over their ancestors’ graves, reflecting and praying with such naturalness that one senses perhaps they do reach beyond mortal limits to reconnect with those who strain from the grave to be remembered and to preserve bonds that can be eternal. One feels this in fleeting images: a widow kneeling at the foot of her husband’s grave; parents whispering to a wide-eyed child; a young couple holding each other close, staring into the autumn mists.

It is not a sad occasion. Rather, there is a feeling of subdued celebration, of deepest gratitude for sacrifices great and small: for parents who scrimped and saved for their children, for the tender mercies of the caregiver, for poets whose vigils in the long dark years of Russian rule gave tonic to the nation’s soul, and, always, for the valor of lives lost in endless uprisings and the long and lonely struggle against godless communism.

From the smallest village to the greatest city, the observance defines, in part, what it means to be a Pole. It is a pilgrimage not to be missed _ and few Poles do.

I first witnessed the ritual in 1989, a week before the Berlin Wall fell; not much has changed since. Last year, I took a packed bus to Powazki, the most famous cemetery in Poland, and emerged on a sidewalk lined with flower stalls rippling in color _ from chrysanthemums the size of dinner plates, to exquisite wine-tinted roses and potted geraniums.

The archbishop of Warsaw, followed by priests, nuns and acolytes, led a procession through Powazki down the Avenue of the Meritorious, the final resting place of many national heroes: Marian Rejewski, the mathematician and cryptologist who broke the code of the German Enigma machine and hastened the end of World War II; Wladyslaw Szpilman, subject of the Oscar-winning film, “The Pianist”; and Irena Sendlerowa, the Catholic social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust.

At one point, the procession stopped to pray by a simple marker that honors thousands of Polish officers who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in what is known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. Russia’s refusal to acknowledge Katyn as a genocide _ or even as a Stalinist crime _ remains a major barrier to better relations between the two countries.

Beyond the flowers, candles and incense, the Poles _ arguably more than any people on earth _ remain in touch with their past, both personally and collectively. Their national identity is so strong that almost two centuries of brutal foreign rule failed utterly to diminish it at all. They retain a clear idea of who they are, drawn in part from beyond the grave, from ancestors who surely speak to them on All Saints’ Day.

(Allen Paul is the author of “Katyn” and is writing a novel about Poland that will be published in the fall of 2009.)

KRE DS END PAUL