I have two ancestor altars—the one in my dining room with photos, offerings, and all kinds of memento mori; and the one in my heart where I have inscribed the names of all those on the other side that I have known that I have come to me. These are not just biological relatives—grandmothers and great-aunts, cousins and distant patriachs—but teachers, neighbors, pets, and even seemingly random strangers who have arrived in my life from the land of the dead. I help people work with the dead and their saints and holy helpers and ancestors often become entangled with my own so that in the middle of the night I am calling out not just to my own grandmothers but theirs as well. I try not to leave anyone out because I, too, never want to be left out. In the land of the dead we are all each other’s mothers after all. I also leave no one out because when I have some heavy lifting to do I know that I have a huge roster of folks who I can call upon and I am often surprised by who shows up. My mother and father do not have to do everything. There are so many souls on the other side with their hands raised waiting for us to call upon them, to show up for us and let us know how much they love us.
The simplest rubric I use for assignments is to think about who was particularly good at something in life, figuring they still have access to those talents. So I call on my husband’s grandmother’s handyman for help fixing my vaccum (read that story here.) Or I call on my father, the surgeon, to guide the doctor’s hands when a friend needs an operation. That kind of thing. I also know that failure is a great teacher. Who better to help us sober up than the alchoholic who died of drink? Who better to help us get our work published than the frustrated author who dreamed of success but never found it? But then, of course, there are more mysterious reasons why we begin to work with someone that only reveal themselves once our project together is underway.
I have learned, over the years, to trust when a name from my litany of the dead, my ancestor altar of the heart, pops into my head “for now apparent reason.” We have work to do together even if I don’t know what it is.
One of my many prayer labyrinths is a 54-day Novena that I do with The Way of the Rose (Two Moons One Prayer) and I have begun making sure that each novena I walk has a patron saint from the other side. For this novena which includes the new year and my birthday I found myself praying for a Jubilee Year. This prayer arose out of a deep experience of final healing with my father (you can read about that here) and also an urgent yearning for “easier times ahead.” A Jubilee Year was in Jewish folk practice a time when all debts were forgiven. Yeshua was invoking such a year when he said, “forgive us our debts as we forgive those who debt against us.”
Yesterday my blessed yoga teacher spoke of the tabula rasa as that morning you awaken to a world covered in freshly fallen snow when all is quiet, magical, possible. A dawn where all old resentments, mistakes, and karmic mishaps have evaporated. A new day, a great soul reset, a sense of no longer needing to be learning from or untangling the mess of the past.
Who could possibly be my guide from the other side for such a petition?
The most unlikely of characters showed up.
Russell and Eleanor Makepeace were an older couple who were our neighbors when I was growing up. They lived in a lovely home in the woods surrounded by the shade-filled gardens that Ellie tended with great care. Often when I write about the embroidery of the soul I think of her needlwork pillows which she worked on the evening when I went over to her house with my parents to watch Masterpiece Theater on their color television. Every Sunday night we’d sit in their parlor and just before the show began Ellie would pass around a box of Whitman’s Chocolates that I felt like was absolute magic. Which one would I choose this week?
Ellie had the gravelly voice of the longtime smoker she was, regalling us with stories of her youth in Texas, as Queen of the May with her childhood partner Howard Hughes, about visiting a ranch that turned out to rassle nothing but prunes…she was a delightful raconteur.
Russell beamed quietly beside her. He would launch into some long shaggy dog story that meandered through various incomprehensible episodes but would always conclude in the same way each and every time. “Of course he knew Biff who knew Tipp who knew Skippy who went to Williams.” Russell had gone to Williams and it has been, other than marrying the effervescent Ellie, the highpoint of his life. The great joke occured that when I finally went on my college tour I fell in love with Williams, with the mountains mostly, and ended up going there. He was delighted and I now fell into the litany of friends and alumni who grounded all his tales.
I didn’t know him very well because as a child you sit in the parlor mostly wondering when the chocolates are going to be passed around and not what who this old man really was, what his dreams were, his passions, his concerns. I never really knew him but I must admit that he was an absolutely benign presence in a childhood that had all too many complicated characters in it.
But why would he be the patron saint of my Jubilee Year? I looked around for someone else but in my mind’s eye but there he was, beaming at me. Ah! I remembered at last. He had actually been a small town banker, a fact I’d never paid much attention to because he also grew cranberries and that seemed at least slightly more interesting. Nevertheless perhaps his banking skills and his network of college connections might help him bring some magic to my novena.
And how.
I am barely a week into this eight week novena and already I am flabbergasted. A beloved friend with whom I experienced a rift reached out unexpectedly and all has been healed. A longterm physical inconvenience that I thought might require elaborate surgery if it could even be remedied was dealt with expediently by my new doctor. And yesterday out of the blue Clark and I received notice in the mail that a significant old financial debt had been forgiven. A Jubilee year indeed.
There he was in my childhood this saint I did not know was a saint waiting to offer me miracles upon miracles from the other side like a box of chocolates. I cannot wait to see what other magic he has in store for me. I am always, each and every day, stunned by how much the dead love us, how long and patiently they have loved us, how much they want to show up for us in our loves. All of the dead love us.
This is why my two ancestor altars are so important because I never knew who I am going to need next. I never know who is going to show up next. It’s a vast mystery of love.
Mr. Makepeace is making peace in my life. I used to go to work with nuclear freeze activists in college in the Makepeace room and explain to them that Mr. Makepeace was actually a real person. I don’t have a photo of Russie Makepeace as I remember him, stooped, wrinkled, old, his clothes hanging on him. But I found a photo online from his younger days and his smile is unchanged—kind, wise, loving. There he is. Finally, so many years after his death I have begun to know who this soul really is. And I suspect from the other side he is regalling his friends with stories of the magic he is cooking up with Perdita “who went to Williams.”
Space still remains in my month-long journey on working with the dead Ancestral Collaborations. You can find out more about the workshop and register for it here. All Zoom sessions are recorded and sent to all participants.
Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy.
In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother, excerpts of which can be found on her paid Substack.
She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.
I love this, Perdita. As you explain the practical, day-to-day challenges, such as "making peace" with old friends, old debts and with our bodies are the most demanding needs we struggle to come to terms with. You've also (unknowingly) beautifully anticipated my own need to make peace in my family and I wonder if I might call on your childhood neighbor for help. What a name! Looking forward to your class! Peace and blessings to you.