On Halloween night, I read Psalm 93. The floods were lifting up their voices. By morning, I had reached Psalm 107, where people conducting business on great waters discover that having a business does not entitle them to cooperative water.
This seemed relevant.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra, and helps support Fredhappy. Thank you.
On the morning of November 1, I asked God to tell me about freedom. I opened my Bible to the Book of Psalms. This made me smile.
Then I asked what might be helpful now and opened Robert H. Mounce’s Jesus, in His Own Words to the Good Samaritan. I love that book, and I thought deeply about that story.
There was a man on a dangerous road. There were robbers. There were respectable people with somewhere else to be. Eventually, someone stopped.
I have been thinking about the stopping.
The Samaritan tends the injured man, transports him to an inn, pays for his care, and promises to cover additional expenses when he returns. The man reaches shelter.
Meanwhile, the road remains the road. The story gives us no prosecution of the robbers, no infrastructure announcement, and no ribbon-cutting ceremony for a safer civilization.
Someone helps anyway.
There is an enormous amount of human history between the wish that the world would become safe and the decision to help somebody reach a safer place. Much of that history involves ritual.
We light things. We write things down. We put food out for people who no longer have digestive systems. We address ancestors, angels, saints, gods, and the ceiling. We ask for protection, deliverance, reconciliation, money, justice, a sign, or enough peace to get through a tough day at work.
- Sometimes we ask for something to leave us.
- Some people ask for something to leave their fields and go into somebody else.
That distinction deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives.
Samhain and Day of the Dead: Who Gets Invited Across the Threshold?
Around Samhain, Día de los Muertos, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, the relationship between the living and the dead becomes visible in public life.
- Candles appear.
- Graves receive visitors.
- Food acquires an additional audience.
- Names that ordinary conversation has stopped using are spoken again.
These traditions have distinct histories. Samhain marks the seasonal threshold into winter in Irish tradition. Recorded Halloween customs include expectations of returning souls, divination, disguises, and protections for the household.
Día de los Muertos brings Indigenous Mesoamerican traditions into relationship with the Catholic calendar. The dead are welcomed through offerings, photographs, flowers, food, and remembrance.
Their differences are part of what makes the comparison interesting. A threshold can be opened in welcome, guarded against intrusion, or approached in the hope of receiving information.
The underlying questions are remarkably persistent. Who may come near us? What do we owe them? What can they give us? How do we recognize a visitor, and how do we persuade one to leave?
Human beings have been negotiating access for a very long time. The doorbell camera arrived late.
An ancestor’s favorite food on an altar can express love with extraordinary specificity. This person liked this dish. This person belonged here. Death has changed the relationship, but the living continue to make room for it.
That room can hold gratitude and grief together. It can also raise questions about inheritance that have nothing to do with the furniture.
What else have we been feeding?
Ancestor Rituals Around the World: The Relationship Continues
In ancient Egypt, people wrote letters to deceased relatives requesting help with problems among the living. Some surviving examples were written on bowls. A family member could be dead and still receive an urgent request concerning illness, conflict, or protection.
Anyone who has ever been responsible for a family may find the persistence of the assignment familiar.
These letters reveal people trying to get help through relationships they believed continued beyond death. The deceased could still have influence. The living could still have a claim on their attention. Affection, obligation, grievance, and hope crossed the threshold together.
In Yorùbá Egúngún traditions, ancestral presence takes form through sacred regalia, trained performance, music, and movement. Within the tradition, the returning ancestor participates in the life of the community. Cloth, preparation, and embodied action help make that encounter possible.
Japanese Obon offers another pattern of welcome, with lanterns and offerings associated with the return of ancestral spirits. Chinese Hungry Ghost observances include provisions for ancestors and for spirits who have no descendants to care for them.
These festivals occur on their own calendars. November is our doorway into the comparison; humanity has arranged appointments with the dead throughout the year.
Chinese paper offerings make the relationship between ancient practice and modern life particularly vivid. Representations of money, houses, cars, phones, and computers can be burned as provisions for the deceased.
The afterlife has encountered the upgrade cycle.
The humor belongs beside the seriousness. The objects change as life changes, while the desire to maintain the relationship continues.
- Someone wants a loved one to be comfortable.
- Someone fears neglecting an obligation.
- Someone hopes an offering will relieve suffering or secure assistance.
We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at manufacturing things. Our questions about abandonment, protection, belonging, and death remain recognizable.
Rituals of Transfer: What Is Supposed to Move?
“Technology” usually suggests a device with a charging cable and an account you cannot remember creating. Here, I am using the word for an organized practice intended to accomplish something.
A ritual can bring together words, materials, gestures, timing, and intention. Participants understand those elements as doing work.
An offering may nourish or honor. A petition requests intervention. An invocation calls a presence. A blessing asks for good to reach someone. A protective rite establishes or renews a boundary. A rite of release gives departure a recognizable form.
To understand a ritual, follow what participants believe is moving.
Is it food, merit, guilt, protection, authority, misfortune, remembrance, or an obligation? Who gives it? Who receives it? What makes the movement possible within that belief system?
Paper is especially interesting here. It can hold a name, a prayer, a request, an accusation, a petition for retribution, or a wish. It gives language a body small enough to fold away from oneself.
Floating wish paper turns that relationship into a visible event. A person writes an intention, lights the specially made paper according to its instructions, and watches it rise. The material action provides a moment around which meaning can gather.
A person can understand that moment spiritually, psychologically, aesthetically, or through several of those lenses at once. The ceremony gives an inward intention an outward event.
The harder question arrives when the intended destination is another person who has agreed to none of it.
A living attention can be selected the same way. Someone offers a private detail or becomes visibly distressed; the receiver’s nervous system stays occupied sorting an ambiguous signal—warmth that withdraws, a question that probes, a reduction in apparent size that asks to be ratified.
While that sorting continues, the sender keeps the next move.
- Explanations and careful repairs can be gathered as further evidence.
- A brief change in the eyes—registration rather than concern—marks the moment the distress or the information is filed as usable.
Reputation and future attention can be restrained by the same route: the story shifts onto the person who named the problem, their manner becomes the topic, and the original question recedes while they spend their hours defending a character that has been reassigned. The arrangers receive relief, rank, or the soothing of something unaddressed.
The selected person leaves carrying the work and the consequence. The transfer does not require ancient costume. It requires only that the cost of accurate speech stay higher than the cost of letting the account stand.
The Psalms, Angels, and the Search for Protection
The Psalms contain praise, terror, gratitude, fury, bewilderment, and appeals for rescue. They give language to people who have reached the edge of their own means.
Psalm 93 allows the floods their tremendous voice. Then it places that force beneath a greater sovereignty.
I find something useful in that distinction. Noise can dominate an experience without possessing the final authority over it.
Psalm 107 takes us aboard the ship. The people on the water are working. They encounter a storm that carries them beyond competence and into desperation. They cry out, the storm is stilled, and they reach the haven they desire.
There is theological difficulty here, too: the God who stills the storm also commands it. The poem holds a relationship with power that exceeds the sailors’ control. Their cry does not make them masters of the sea.
People also seek protection through angels. Psalm 91 describes God commanding angels to guard a person. Other devotional and esoteric practices include directly addressing angels for guidance or assistance. These approaches locate authority differently, but they share the desire for help beyond the individual’s immediate resources.
Anna Riva’s Power of the Psalms belongs in this inquiry because it brings us into the practical ritual use of sacred language. The question becomes what people ask a text to do when they read it, speak it, or incorporate it into a practice.
The answer I encountered was a man stopping beside someone who had been hurt.
The Good Samaritan and the Work of Repair
The Samaritan sees an injured person and allows that person’s condition to alter his plans.
He spends resources. He takes responsibility for immediate care. He brings another person into the work by making arrangements with the innkeeper.
His help has a destination: the injured man’s care.
This matters in an essay about transfer because the direction and terms of the movement matter. The Samaritan voluntarily contributes what he has. The injured man’s need becomes a reason to provide help.
We can recognize something very different when a group makes one person responsible for absorbing discomfort, protecting appearances, or keeping a harmful arrangement functional.
A person can be generous and still question an assignment. They can care about other people and ask who authorized the expectation that they would carry everybody’s consequences.
My question about freedom lives here.
I want to help people reach somewhere they can think, recover, and choose. I also want room to consider what repair requires after the immediate emergency has passed.
The road is still there. The next person may need help. The person who stopped will eventually need rest.
Mercy operates inside these unfinished conditions.
Fredhappy Healing Touchstone: Give What Comes Next Thoughtful Attention
You have carried a great deal. What comes next deserves thoughtful attention.
Healing Touchstone Services™ offers one-to-one conversations for people finding their footing after difficult experiences, navigating change, or considering a different direction in life.
You may be working through workplace harm, changes in a relationship, years of family responsibility, or an experience that changed how you understand yourself. Perhaps you have already done substantial healing work and want support as you begin putting that understanding into practice.
Bring the concern, decision, or possibility that keeps returning to your mind. Together, we can examine what you are carrying, what matters to you, and what a useful next step could look like within the realities of your life.
I bring a background in anthropology and marketing, lived experience of rebuilding after profound disruption, and respect for the work involved in healing. This is nonclinical personal support grounded in attentive conversation. You set the focus.
Your first Healing Touchstone conversation is $20. We will discuss what brings you here, what support you are looking for, and whether working together feels like a useful fit.
Book your first Healing Touchstone conversation.
Continue Into the Stranger Questions
The deeper inquiry begins with a disturbing proposition: a community may seek relief by assigning its burden to a substitute.
Below, we follow that proposition through scapegoat rites, storm gods, coercive petitions, mirrors, and the ordinary social practices through which an invented story can acquire real consequences. Frank Zappa comes along. There is also a river that has been waiting to move.
Become a paid Fredhappy subscriber to read the full exploration and support more independently researched essays about the beliefs, stories, and human arrangements shaping our lives.