On All Saints’ Day, I arrive early and spend some time alone in the choir loft with the pipe organ, admiring from my perch the darkness below, the candles, the little table of relics—tiny bits of saints’ bones and blood encased in sparkling golden frames, reliquaries—that the priest had lovingly arranged in front of the altar.

My nails are still painted black from Halloween night, and my temporary bracelet tattoos of skulls are just beginning to peel from my wrists. This seems right. A month of spooky tales and ghost stories has prepared me for this feast. And the darker side of my imagination and experiences—my goth and my grief—led me here, to the Catholic Church. We sing the Litany of Saints as the priest and the altar boys process to the altar, following each name with the plea, Pray for Us. Calling out to the dead, asking for a response.

“We are here, surrounded by spirits,” the priest says in his homily. He points out that the schoolchildren dressed as saints are an external sign of a hidden reality. The saints are here, now, and at every Mass. “We are all pilgrims,” he went on, “and this church is our ship. We are on our way to another land.” But he didn’t mean that we won’t arrive in that strange kingdom until we die. We need not wait for eternal union with God, or for reunion with those we grieve. “When we process to the altar, we leave time and enter eternity,” he said. Every time the host touches the tongue, heaven and earth meet. “You have made contact,” he said. “You have communicated.”

- Excerpted from Strange Journey by Jessica Mesman Griffith and Jonathan Ryan