“In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” Frederick Buechner
On this All Saints Day, memories of loved ones now gone flood my soul. Some of them I encountered every day of my life until they were gone. Others I knew only through brief encounters, and for a short moment. And some, even some of the most formative in my journey, I never actually met! Together they form now a heavenly host, still with me on my way by faith home to them. “I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy Catholic Church; the communion of saints…” is what I’ll say again with you as we come to the Lord’s Table on Sunday.
It’s always been a profoundly comforting thought to me, that somehow the saints have life still, and are with me, with us. How wonderful. But equally frustrating is my lingering wish to somehow see and hear from them. I wonder — is it my/our limitations that keep us from seeing and sensing their communion with us? Or, is there some barrier that comes with death that just can’t be penetrated? Either way, How I wish I could talk again with my grandparents now that I’m much older. What fun it would be to encounter Howard Geake just one more weekday morning over at the Northfield Restaurant! Or my preschool teacher who loved me so much, a sacred memory for me. Or find myself sitting on a park bench between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! Or, to be really greedy, to run into St. Augustine in the religious book section at the Barnes and Noble and go for Coffee! Just what does the “communion of saints” mean from what feels like such a veiled distance?
In the end, I guess what matters most is their living presence, even if I can only believe in such a reality by faith. Hope abides, that there’s much more on the horizon than the last score of this mortal life as I swallow hard, approaching a big birthday with a “6” at its beginning. As my childhood pastor Glen Wiberg used to say it, I have stolen his words through my years: “The glory just out in front of us.”
Maybe more than anything else, the saints are living reminders that the best is yet to be, and that just when we think the sunset of life is beginning to glow that it’s actually a sunrise, a new beginning after all and in the end.
I’m looking forward to speaking their names, and singing “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine”, and hoping for renewed hope in this strange belief the church has always had that they are with us still, and that still, some great day, we will be with them again, this time forever! “We’re marching to Zion, beautiful beautiful Zion, we’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God.”
“Eternal God, not bound by time, we give you thanks for all the saints who have gone before us, who work beside us, who live beyond us. Open us to their presence among us: the words of prophets on our lips, the blood of martyrs cursing through our veins, the visions of mystics before our eyes, the love of those who embraced poverty innervating our muscles to acts of compassion. May we be so caught up in their Alleluia, our lives vibrating, like theirs, with the pulse of eternity, until the very foundations of this old world begin rumble and give way to your new creation; and through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.” (Jan Richardson)
Love From Here
Peter Hawkinson
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