HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 19, 2024 – God has me attending church services again, and to my credit, I’m at least not running screaming for the door 20 minutes into the proceedings, like I used to. I’m (mostly) managing to make it all the way to the end, with copious help from God.

In attending these services, I’m occasionally invited by other attendees to attend other services. One recent invitation was to a choral requiem on All Souls Day (November 2). Having been out of the ecclesiastical loop for several years, I wasn’t exactly sure what a choral requiem was, but the fact that it was to take place in the Little Dutch Church by candlelight piqued my interest.

The Little Dutch Church is actually a little German church (the German word for “German” being “Deutsch”, which sounds like “Dutch” to the untrained ear, hence the inaccurate name). The modest one-room wooden structure was built in Halifax in the 1750s to serve as a worship and meeting center for the then fledging German immigrant community in Nova Scotia. Like a tiny home is to a mansion, the Little Dutch Church is to a standard-sized church, giving it an intensely intimate feel. I attended a few services in the tiny church in September, but it’s closed now for the winter (no heating; the old wood stove was removed), with the sole exception of the upcoming All Souls service. I was genuinely looking forward to attending that service (again, mainly because of where it was being held) until I found out what kind of service it is.

A choral requiem is a sung mass for the dead. It’s held on behalf of the dead, who obviously can’t hold services for themselves or pray for themselves anymore. But, stupid me, when I heard “all souls”, I thought it was a service where we’d be praying for the souls of people here on Earth (like me praying for you, and you praying for me). Nothing could be farther from the truth. The set liturgy for All Souls services is specifically and pointedly a series of recited “prayers” for the dead, that is, pre-fabricated requests to God to have mercy on the souls that have left their human bodies. The whole idea underlying these prayers is to sway God’s judgement in favour of those being prayed for, totally ignoring Hebrews 9:27.

I have all kinds of problems with praying for the dead, but the main one is that praying for the dead is just a hair’s breadth away from communicating with the dead (or on behalf of the dead), which is necromancy and vehemently condemned by God. All Saints Day, which comes one day before All Souls Day, is actual necromancy, where service attendees recite prayers to the souls of the “departed” and ask them to intervene on our behalf. This, for me, is so far beyond acceptable for Christians, I wipe my hands of it without further comment.

All Souls Day (November 2) services in the Catholic church were formalized about 1000 years ago. You can google it and read about it for yourself, if you’re so inclined. Needless to say, Jesus never instructed us to pray either to or for the dead, and neither did Moses. We pray to God, in Jesus’ name, or we can pray to Jesus, too, if we want, but we don’t pray to souls who are no longer on Earth in a human body, and we don’t pray on behalf of any souls who’ve left this plane of existence. We pray to God and we pray to Jesus and we pray for the benefit of souls who are still here in their human bodies: Everything else comes from the devil and should be vigorously shunned and avoided.

The pagan-originating demon-summoning festivals that occur at the end of October and the beginning of November (when allegedly the “spiritual veil” between the living and the dead is the thinnest and entities from other realms can pass through into our realm) are the obvious inspirations for the All Saints and All Souls feasts in the Catholic church. I expect nothing less from that openly demon- and idol-worshiping papist organization, but I’m sad to learn that Protestants, too, have adopted this evil “tradition” and continue to practice it to this day.

Knowing now what goes on at All Saints and All Souls church services, I want nothing to do with any of them, including the one that takes place in the little wooden church where my German forebearers likely gathered to worship the Lord. Instead, I’ll be spending those nights reading the Bible and praying to God and Jesus, thanking them for everything they do and giving myself wholeheartedly and unreservedly to their service.

I invite you to do the same. Let’s pray that veil so thick, nothing will get through.