Small wonder I awoke at 2:00 AM awash in feelings and memories. As is often true for me in these moments, I try to breathe into them. Feel them thoroughly. And, in time, bathe them in a quiet prayer. Contemplating his death took me on a journey through other significant deaths: my beloved Aunt Donna, my sisters Linda and Beth, my mother as well as a few cherished congregants including Dolores Brown, Kathy Arzt, Michael Daniels, and Don Wooton. I felt a churning anxiety in my chest concerning the enormity of eternity. And then the spiritual fog burned away as I became aware that this was just what I had spoken about in my Sunday reflection: the visitation of my loved ones in my own intimate All Souls Day.
The Celts believed that this time of year was a "thin place" - a porous and alive season that encouraged visitations from beyond our realm - a unique intimacy between the living and the dead. Before heading to bed last night, I sang the song I offered at my father's memorial service - and wept again. Driving down to Maryland in a mean storm, Tom Waits' "Hold On" came over the radio, and I felt that it might be the right one for Big Jim's farewell. After his passing, that same feeling washed over me again so I used it in the context of the love he shared for my mother. I now know that Waits' song massaged my psyche in ways I cannot explain except to say I was somehow now ready for another encounter with my departed ancestors.
REFLECTION: ALL HALLOW’S EVE, ALL SAINTS DAY, ALL SOULS DAY, AND DAY OF THE DEAD
Psalm 148
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, all the angels; praise the Lord, all the hosts!
Praise the Lord, sun and moon; praise the Lord, all you shining stars!
Praise the Lord from the earth, you monsters of the seas and all deeps,
Fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s commands!
Mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle,
Creeping things and flying birds: let ALL creation praise the Lord!
Matthew 22: 34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered and one of them, a lawyer, asked a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ Jesus replied, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
I am a Johnny come lately to some of the smaller observances of my Christian
tradition. Having been raised in staid, proper, and resolutely Protestant Pilgrim New England, my baptism into the balanced beauty of feasting and fasting – celebrations and silences emanating from the ebb and flow of God’s first word in nature – occurred relatively late in life. It has been said that when the student is ready, the Buddha will appear – and Gertrud Mueller-Nelson showed up as a bodhisattva for me in her masterwork: To Dance with God: a Guide to Family Ritual and Community Celebra-tion. Other wisdom-keepers like Kathleen Norris, Fr. Richard Rohr, Sr. Joan Chittister, and the Rev. Frederick Buechner met me along the way, too. But it began with the words of wisdom Dr. Mueller-Nelson crafted in To Dance with God:
We mark the major moments in our human existence with a rite or a ceremony. Sometimes even the small events in our lives need the recognition of a celebration or the consciousness that a ritual brings… in this we draw a circle around that place and that event so that we can be more fully awake to the magnitude of the moment…(throughout time we often remember, celebrate, and sanctify our lives) in conjunction with the moon and sun cycles or simultaneous to the changing seasons in nature. Each day we experience a little birth, life, death, and rebirth. Every day gives us the opportunity to engage the routine rituals – rising and dressing, eating and leaving, relating and working, recreating and sleeping – with greater care and awareness. (To Dance with God, pp. 46/48)
Well after my years in seminary I learned to name this sacramental spirituality, the awareness and practice of seeing the eagle within the egg, a deeper trust that God reveals the sacred inside the commonplace. It’s what Chittister calls a wisdom distilled from the daily: the infusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary, the living, spiritual presence of Christ encountered in bread and wine, depth and integrity at the core of creation even as culture is riddled with the superficial and tinny. What Dr. Mueller-Nelson wrote about Advent continues to shape my soul. bringing solace and strength to my faith: We are invited, she writes, to become vulnerable about our longing and open about our hope. Here we learn to practice a sacred waiting – the blessings of the feminine in our overly masculine culture – in a manner much like a spiritual pregnancy:
Psalm 148
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, all the angels; praise the Lord, all the hosts!
Praise the Lord, sun and moon; praise the Lord, all you shining stars!
Praise the Lord from the earth, you monsters of the seas and all deeps,
Fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s commands!
Mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, wild animals and cattle,
Creeping things and flying birds: let ALL creation praise the Lord!
Matthew 22: 34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered and one of them, a lawyer, asked a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ Jesus replied, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
I am a Johnny come lately to some of the smaller observances of my Christian
We mark the major moments in our human existence with a rite or a ceremony. Sometimes even the small events in our lives need the recognition of a celebration or the consciousness that a ritual brings… in this we draw a circle around that place and that event so that we can be more fully awake to the magnitude of the moment…(throughout time we often remember, celebrate, and sanctify our lives) in conjunction with the moon and sun cycles or simultaneous to the changing seasons in nature. Each day we experience a little birth, life, death, and rebirth. Every day gives us the opportunity to engage the routine rituals – rising and dressing, eating and leaving, relating and working, recreating and sleeping – with greater care and awareness. (To Dance with God, pp. 46/48)
Well after my years in seminary I learned to name this sacramental spirituality, the awareness and practice of seeing the eagle within the egg, a deeper trust that God reveals the sacred inside the commonplace. It’s what Chittister calls a wisdom distilled from the daily: the infusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary, the living, spiritual presence of Christ encountered in bread and wine, depth and integrity at the core of creation even as culture is riddled with the superficial and tinny. What Dr. Mueller-Nelson wrote about Advent continues to shape my soul. bringing solace and strength to my faith: We are invited, she writes, to become vulnerable about our longing and open about our hope. Here we learn to practice a sacred waiting – the blessings of the feminine in our overly masculine culture – in a manner much like a spiritual pregnancy:
… for waiting will always be with us. Advent invites us to underscore and understand with a new patience that very feminine state of being: waiting. Our masculine world wants to blast away waiting from our lives. Instant gratification has become our constitutional right and delay an aberration. We equate waiting with wasting. So, we build Concorde airplanes, drink instant coffee, roll out green plastic and call it turf, and reach for the phone before we reach for the pen. The more life asks us to wait, the more we anxiously hurry… But waiting mysteriously reveals, as in pregnancy, that nothing of value comes into being without a period of quiet incubation: not a healthy baby, to a loving relationship, not a reconciliation, a new understanding, a work of art, never a transformation. Rather, a shortened period of incubation brings forth what is not whole or strong or even alive. Brewing, baking, simmering, fermenting, ripening, germinating, gestating are the feminine processes of becoming and they are the symbolic states of being which being in a life of value. (p. 62)
Trusting this insight was the key that opened the door to a host of additional wisdom-keepers – particularly sages from the Celtic realm – who encouraged cherishing equanimity, revering the rhythm of the sun and moon, the seasons and the sacred sense of balance they honor, so that spirituality became a passionate, earthy dance of humility, devotion, and creative. Joy Mead, from the Community of Iona in Scotland, puts it like this in a prayer/poem she calls Bread Time:
Because bread won’t be hurried we have to learn to let be, to do nothing, to be patient, to wait for the proving. Because bread won’t be hurried and is a life and death process, we find out in its making that time is not a line, but a cycle of ends and beginnings, rhythms and seasons, growth and death, celebration and mourning, eating and fasting, because bread won’t be hurried. Remember: in a pyramid in Egypt a few grains of wheat lay surrounded by death – dormant for thousands of years. They waited quietly until the time was right, until the life impulse was awakened by the good earth, warmed by the sun and ready to dance in the bread of tomorrow.
This sacred rhythm of creative waiting infused with feasting and fasting, this dance of life driven by sound and silence, is how the three feasts of next week with roots in Celtic Christianity ask to be engaged because they have largely been trivialized and neglected in our culture. All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls Days are rich with blessings. They animate our love of God and embolden our kinship with all of our neighbors – two legged and four, flora and fauna, air, soil, fire and water – so that we might rest into the unforced rhythms of grace even in this damnable and escalating pandemic.
David Adam, vicar of the holy island Lindisfarne, has observed that one of the many reasons why our politics and economic priorities have become ugly, vapid, and increaseingly cruel has something to do with contemporary culture’s disconnect from the sacred rhythms the One who is Holy breathed into creation in the beginning. Everyday there is “betrayal, rejection, crucifixion, and death woven into our streets, homes, and jobs” he writes, “yet the redeeming love and salvation of God is still at work in the world. I believe in the resurrection of the body,” he adds, “for it is an on-going fact” that I witness every day in the “mysterious, joyful, sorrowful, glorious” ebb and flow of real-life.
To have eyes to see, however, takes practice – something modern folk have forsaken and forgotten. In the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, T.S. Eliot articulated a truth in his poem, “The Rock,” that has only been magnified over the years.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, the Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying: The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death and no nearer to GOD? Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from GOD
and nearer to the Dust.
Without familiarity with the way of wisdom, without a sacred vocabulary and a spiritually awakened imagination that we practice regularly, we are indeed tossed to and fro by ideology, fear, grief, and exhaustion like St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4: “We must no longer be as little children, beloved, the apostle says, blown about by ever wind of doctrine, human trickery and their deceitful scheming… no we must ripen and mature as Christ himself did by listening and practicing grace-filled love.”
The soul of Celtic spirituality in general, and the heart of next week’s three feast days, offer an alternative to the dust and chaos that reclaims a sacred vocabulary and renews our awareness of creation’s salvific rhythm. You see, the ancient Celtic Church did not cast off as inferior or heretical the numinous insights of their Druid ancestors. Patrick, Brigid, Columba, Deirdre and all the rest embraced them, carrying them into the emerging cadence of their sacramental spirituality. As the days grew darker in the North Country, the old souls sensed that the veil between heaven and earth – the living and dead – was becoming more porous. Christopher Hill writes in his wise, Holidays and Holy Nights, that: “In traditional cultures, the important turning points of the year – solstices and equinoxes, or the changes of the pastoral seasons when the heard or flock was let out into summer pasture and the brought down for the winter – were understood to stand outside of time.”
In the more sensuous awareness of time that people had in the absence of precise measuring systems, it was apparent that at these moments, one ‘time’ had ended and another time would start again in the new season. But between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next was a gap. At these points, it was believed, the world reverted to the way it was before time began – in the beginning, at the birth of creation, a dreamtime as the Australian aborigines say. Our world became continuous with the timeless world and all the beings and powers, things seen and unseen, inhabitants of the world, before, above, and outside of time – gods, angels, ancestors, and spirits – became present… This human sense of time is so deep and apparently universal that it has found its way into almost every religious tradition – including our own. And is the root of most holy days. This sacred sense of time and timelessness can break through at any moment but is celebrated in the sacraments of our holy days. (pp. 50-51)
… so that we can practice reclaiming eyes to see and ears to hear. Next week it’s going to get really, really dark in these parts as we give up the warm evening sun for the refracted, diminishing glow of Eastern Standard Time. I don’t recall any significant differences in the way light looked when we lived in Arizona or California, but here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it becomes murky and dense by 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So, even without this modern manipulation of time, this darkness that creeps into being at this time of year is one of the reasons our pre-Christian Celtic kin created the festival of Samhain.
It marks the birth of winter as most of the leaves on our trees have fallen, frosts begins to appear, the fields lay fallow and “autumn looks like nature’s end.” The old way insisted that as one season closed, it must be acknowledged with a sign of finality so that our souls might open to receiving new possibilities. “With the death of summer and fall, the dormancy of nature” readies us for the inwardness of winter.” (Mueller-Nelson, p. 222) In the way of wisdom ritualized in sacramental spirituality, the “mystery of apparent death, finalities and rest before new life returns” is rehearsed liturgically so that we might practice recognizing the holy as it arrives beyond our control in real life.
First there is All Hallows Eve – Halloween for us – the Holy Night that prepares us
for Holi-Day of All Saints and then All Souls day. October 31st was Samhain, the celebration of the year’s death in anticipation of a new year’s birth. Just like the creation story in Genesis, there is evening and there is day with darkness setting the stage for the cycle of illumination still to come. Christianity chose to appropriate the energy of this Celtic ritual – borrowing the colors, symbols, and feelings of the season – but adding new insights, too. No one is fully clear how the pagan Celts practiced Samhain, but “the persistence of some things now offers us clues: bonfires as well as fortune-telling took place, feasting and dancing was robust, as was guising or mumming (going to one another’s dwellings in a variety of costumes with songs and ritualized begging.” (Hill, p. 53) It’s likely the bonfires included some type of sacrifice on this night – probably human and/or animals deemed evil – before these rituals became symbolic. Fear of ghosts and wicked curses filled the darkness “as demons went wild playing tricks on the innocent and needing to be placated with treats and sweet food.” Gertrud Mueller-Nelson adds:
To have eyes to see, however, takes practice – something modern folk have forsaken and forgotten. In the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, T.S. Eliot articulated a truth in his poem, “The Rock,” that has only been magnified over the years.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven, the Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars, O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying: The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death and no nearer to GOD? Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from GOD
and nearer to the Dust.
Without familiarity with the way of wisdom, without a sacred vocabulary and a spiritually awakened imagination that we practice regularly, we are indeed tossed to and fro by ideology, fear, grief, and exhaustion like St. Paul writes in Ephesians 4: “We must no longer be as little children, beloved, the apostle says, blown about by ever wind of doctrine, human trickery and their deceitful scheming… no we must ripen and mature as Christ himself did by listening and practicing grace-filled love.”
The soul of Celtic spirituality in general, and the heart of next week’s three feast days, offer an alternative to the dust and chaos that reclaims a sacred vocabulary and renews our awareness of creation’s salvific rhythm. You see, the ancient Celtic Church did not cast off as inferior or heretical the numinous insights of their Druid ancestors. Patrick, Brigid, Columba, Deirdre and all the rest embraced them, carrying them into the emerging cadence of their sacramental spirituality. As the days grew darker in the North Country, the old souls sensed that the veil between heaven and earth – the living and dead – was becoming more porous. Christopher Hill writes in his wise, Holidays and Holy Nights, that: “In traditional cultures, the important turning points of the year – solstices and equinoxes, or the changes of the pastoral seasons when the heard or flock was let out into summer pasture and the brought down for the winter – were understood to stand outside of time.”
In the more sensuous awareness of time that people had in the absence of precise measuring systems, it was apparent that at these moments, one ‘time’ had ended and another time would start again in the new season. But between the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next was a gap. At these points, it was believed, the world reverted to the way it was before time began – in the beginning, at the birth of creation, a dreamtime as the Australian aborigines say. Our world became continuous with the timeless world and all the beings and powers, things seen and unseen, inhabitants of the world, before, above, and outside of time – gods, angels, ancestors, and spirits – became present… This human sense of time is so deep and apparently universal that it has found its way into almost every religious tradition – including our own. And is the root of most holy days. This sacred sense of time and timelessness can break through at any moment but is celebrated in the sacraments of our holy days. (pp. 50-51)
… so that we can practice reclaiming eyes to see and ears to hear. Next week it’s going to get really, really dark in these parts as we give up the warm evening sun for the refracted, diminishing glow of Eastern Standard Time. I don’t recall any significant differences in the way light looked when we lived in Arizona or California, but here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts it becomes murky and dense by 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So, even without this modern manipulation of time, this darkness that creeps into being at this time of year is one of the reasons our pre-Christian Celtic kin created the festival of Samhain.
It marks the birth of winter as most of the leaves on our trees have fallen, frosts begins to appear, the fields lay fallow and “autumn looks like nature’s end.” The old way insisted that as one season closed, it must be acknowledged with a sign of finality so that our souls might open to receiving new possibilities. “With the death of summer and fall, the dormancy of nature” readies us for the inwardness of winter.” (Mueller-Nelson, p. 222) In the way of wisdom ritualized in sacramental spirituality, the “mystery of apparent death, finalities and rest before new life returns” is rehearsed liturgically so that we might practice recognizing the holy as it arrives beyond our control in real life.
First there is All Hallows Eve – Halloween for us – the Holy Night that prepares us
What is unseen and unknown is often rendered evil or dangerous.” As the light vanished at the close of the year it was believed that the night became saturated with the spirits of the departed dead. Some of those spirits were troublesome, but others were beloved and were “invited to return to their old homes to sit by the fireside, be warmed and fed, and respected once more in the land of the living. (Mueller-Nelson, p. 223)
The Celtic Church before the 4th century transfigured this fire festival maintaining many of its outward rituals but filling them with sanctified meaning: sweet foods and candles were now taken to the graves of the departed where stories and memories were shared and passed down from one generation to the next as the living communed with the dead. Soul cakes were baked and passed out to children – and beggars, too - as some in the community playfully dressed as witches, ghosts, and goblins to honor the fears of the past. And the whole community sometimes gathered to carve pumpkins and gourds and dunk for apples. These evening festivals set the stage of two holy DAYS of remembering: All Saints Day was a reflection on those from within the tradition who brought new life to the world, while All Souls Day was a chance each year to honor our own loved ones who are now part of that great cloud of witnesses.
I have found that the way Gertrud Mueller-Nelson AND Frederick Buechner talk about All Saints Day helpful: “All Saints Day is the celebration of those who have contributed successfully to the creation of God’s community in history. The saints were not perfect, but they were whole, holy, and very human. They lived their fate with creativity and participated in the evolution of human consciousness” and compassion. Frederick Buechner amplifies this insight writing:
The Celtic Church before the 4th century transfigured this fire festival maintaining many of its outward rituals but filling them with sanctified meaning: sweet foods and candles were now taken to the graves of the departed where stories and memories were shared and passed down from one generation to the next as the living communed with the dead. Soul cakes were baked and passed out to children – and beggars, too - as some in the community playfully dressed as witches, ghosts, and goblins to honor the fears of the past. And the whole community sometimes gathered to carve pumpkins and gourds and dunk for apples. These evening festivals set the stage of two holy DAYS of remembering: All Saints Day was a reflection on those from within the tradition who brought new life to the world, while All Souls Day was a chance each year to honor our own loved ones who are now part of that great cloud of witnesses.
I have found that the way Gertrud Mueller-Nelson AND Frederick Buechner talk about All Saints Day helpful: “All Saints Day is the celebration of those who have contributed successfully to the creation of God’s community in history. The saints were not perfect, but they were whole, holy, and very human. They lived their fate with creativity and participated in the evolution of human consciousness” and compassion. Frederick Buechner amplifies this insight writing:
In God’s holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief – and these handkerchiefs are called saints. Many people think of saints as plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, ""I am foremost among sinners"" and Jesus himself prayed God to forgive him his trespasses. When the rich young man addressed him as ""good Teacher,"" answered, ""No one is good but God alone.” In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, ""Give me chastity and continence, just not now,"" that Saint Francis started out as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves. The Holy Spirit has been called ""the Lord and giver of life"" and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.
Returning thanks to God for those who have brought YOU more life is at the heart of this feast day. I don’t believe they have to be Christians – or famous – or necessarily dead. But that’s my generous orthodoxy speaking. Going backwards in time to discern and give thanks to those who within my experience have been life-givers and wisdom-keeper for me has been soul food. Among this pantheon are St. Mary Magdalene, St. Francis and Clare, St. Ray Swartzback, St. MLK and St. Rumi. Each have illuminated my heart with love and tenderness. The once Irish priest turned secular saint, the late John O’Donohue, wrote of the blessings we have received from our saints like this:
I imagine the eyes of Jesus were harvest brown,
The light of their gazing suffused with the seasons:
The shadow of winter, the mind of spring, the blues of summer and the amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister to the kindness in his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us, stirring in the heart’s clay
The confidence of seasons that never lose their way to harvest.
(Those who have gazed upon us with this blessing have shared)
The artistry of emptiness that knows to slow the hunger
Of outside things until they weave into the twilight of the heart
A gaze of all that is still future…
And then, after a night of darkness and fire – songs, silence and mystery – and a day given to recalling in gratitude the saints in our days – comes All Souls Day when we remember those in our families who are among the dearly departed and now a part of that great cloud of witnesses. We didn’t do much with All Souls Day when I was young and it has taken me some time to learn why it is holy. But what I grasp now is simple: it is a time to be humbled by the folk who have birthed and shaped us and are now gone. Some were wonderful. Others… not so much. All were human – and most, to paraphrase Brené Brown did their best with what they were given. I no longer want to conflate All Saints with All Souls as that diminishes their unique wisdom. Rather, why not give over two full days to consider those who brought us to life and gave us new life even as we grieve and honor their passing?
Last year at this time I made a small family altar using pictures and poems of those who have gone before me: my parents, grand-parents, sisters, friends, colleagues, mentors and congregants who have touched my life. It was sobering. And sad. Some were those I cherished. Some hurt me deeply. Both were true. Doing this also helped me remember some of the stories long forgotten. How my people hailed from Scotland and Ireland: on the 25th anniversary of my ordination, we visited the wee town of Lumsden outside of Aberdeen, Scotland. Remembering that trip helped me recall that among my kin here and there were loving servants and mean-spirited scoundrels. There were patriots and traitors, probable slave owners as well as sea captains, factory workers, scholars, clergy and cooks, mechanics, business executives along with drug addicts, alcoholics and friends of Bill.
My family, much like yours I imagine, were and are a motley crew: returning thanks for them all has become a simple way of nourishing a bit of inner humility. And one more thing, All Souls Day put me in touch with some incredible stories about ordinary people who have lived into the blessings of God and shared them even while surrounded by the worst human behavior. Richard Rohr reminds us that a great deal has happened among us since the beginning days of the pandemic – and there is much more to come.
Yet the fundamental reality of humanity’s interconnectedness remains as true now as it has been at every moment in our history. Pope Francis said in his recent encyclical All Brothers and Sisters: If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. Humanity, you are all One. You are one beloved community and you are one global sickness. You are all contagious—and always have been, unconsciously infecting and yet able to also bless one another. There are no higher and lower in this world. There is no smart or stupid; no totally right or totally wrong. The only meaningful division now is between those who serve and those who allow themselves to be served. All the rest is temporary posturing.
Many to whom you look for power and leadership have shown themselves to have empty hands, minds, and hearts. We are bereft of all satisfying explanations, all ledgers of deserving and undeserving. There are no perfect answers or absolute heroes. We must all wear a mask to protect the other from “me.” So don’t play the victim! Victimhood is always a waste of time—God’s time and yours. Instead, try to learn the important lessons. We are all in the same elementary school now. Here, we must learn to stand in two different places and to change places often. The served must also be the servants, and the servants must also be the served. Just stay in the eternal circle of the Suffering and the Servants. Christians call this the Body of Christ. We are not the first or the last generation that gets to suffer and to serve on this earth.
I imagine the eyes of Jesus were harvest brown,
The light of their gazing suffused with the seasons:
The shadow of winter, the mind of spring, the blues of summer and the amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister to the kindness in his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us, stirring in the heart’s clay
The confidence of seasons that never lose their way to harvest.
(Those who have gazed upon us with this blessing have shared)
The artistry of emptiness that knows to slow the hunger
Of outside things until they weave into the twilight of the heart
A gaze of all that is still future…
And then, after a night of darkness and fire – songs, silence and mystery – and a day given to recalling in gratitude the saints in our days – comes All Souls Day when we remember those in our families who are among the dearly departed and now a part of that great cloud of witnesses. We didn’t do much with All Souls Day when I was young and it has taken me some time to learn why it is holy. But what I grasp now is simple: it is a time to be humbled by the folk who have birthed and shaped us and are now gone. Some were wonderful. Others… not so much. All were human – and most, to paraphrase Brené Brown did their best with what they were given. I no longer want to conflate All Saints with All Souls as that diminishes their unique wisdom. Rather, why not give over two full days to consider those who brought us to life and gave us new life even as we grieve and honor their passing?
Last year at this time I made a small family altar using pictures and poems of those who have gone before me: my parents, grand-parents, sisters, friends, colleagues, mentors and congregants who have touched my life. It was sobering. And sad. Some were those I cherished. Some hurt me deeply. Both were true. Doing this also helped me remember some of the stories long forgotten. How my people hailed from Scotland and Ireland: on the 25th anniversary of my ordination, we visited the wee town of Lumsden outside of Aberdeen, Scotland. Remembering that trip helped me recall that among my kin here and there were loving servants and mean-spirited scoundrels. There were patriots and traitors, probable slave owners as well as sea captains, factory workers, scholars, clergy and cooks, mechanics, business executives along with drug addicts, alcoholics and friends of Bill.
My family, much like yours I imagine, were and are a motley crew: returning thanks for them all has become a simple way of nourishing a bit of inner humility. And one more thing, All Souls Day put me in touch with some incredible stories about ordinary people who have lived into the blessings of God and shared them even while surrounded by the worst human behavior. Richard Rohr reminds us that a great deal has happened among us since the beginning days of the pandemic – and there is much more to come.
Yet the fundamental reality of humanity’s interconnectedness remains as true now as it has been at every moment in our history. Pope Francis said in his recent encyclical All Brothers and Sisters: If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. Humanity, you are all One. You are one beloved community and you are one global sickness. You are all contagious—and always have been, unconsciously infecting and yet able to also bless one another. There are no higher and lower in this world. There is no smart or stupid; no totally right or totally wrong. The only meaningful division now is between those who serve and those who allow themselves to be served. All the rest is temporary posturing.
Many to whom you look for power and leadership have shown themselves to have empty hands, minds, and hearts. We are bereft of all satisfying explanations, all ledgers of deserving and undeserving. There are no perfect answers or absolute heroes. We must all wear a mask to protect the other from “me.” So don’t play the victim! Victimhood is always a waste of time—God’s time and yours. Instead, try to learn the important lessons. We are all in the same elementary school now. Here, we must learn to stand in two different places and to change places often. The served must also be the servants, and the servants must also be the served. Just stay in the eternal circle of the Suffering and the Servants. Christians call this the Body of Christ. We are not the first or the last generation that gets to suffer and to serve on this earth.
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