Pundits as well as social scientists have noted that we are in the midst of a massive cultural/political/spiritual shift - and it is not at all clear how it will play out. So, while I never hesitate to carefully delineate the stark differences in perspective, values, and goals between the two candidates with those interested in authentic dialogue, listening carefully to their concerns, I refuse to waste my time or energy picking fights with partisan militants. Period. I do not support condescending liberals who denigrate and dehumanize Trump loyalists any more than the racist, sexist xenophobes who continue to condemn Harris as the anti-Christ. Staying within the comfort of our self-righteous siloes changes nothing and only reinforces the destructive aspects of our shadows. I pray that compassion carries the day on November 5th. I support those who advocate for radical diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond all stereotypes. And recognize, as Niebuhr taught, that even our best intentions carry with them unintended consequences that often create new antagonisms. As he was want to say:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
As my life has ripened and changed, l believe like St. Paul that there are charisms for our different stages of consciousness: compassion, humility, and solidarity are constants but they can take on different configurations. Once I was an organizer. Now I am not. Some are called to aggressively challenge the injustices - others are called to bind up the wounded and offer consolation - and both are essential. This is what came to my heart during the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Day 2024.
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One of the joys of my trip from Pittsfield to be with you each week in Palmer is the roughly 75 minutes I spend twice a day on either the Mass Pike or Route 9 through Northampton. The trees this autumn have been spectacular in all their phases. Same was true, too, this spring and summer. The beauty of Mother Nature never fails to evoke prayers of gratitude from me; they are organic icons of God’s generous grace. Now, to be sure, there ARE a few downsides to my pilgrimages, too, ok? I can say I truly HATE getting stuck behind a tractor trailer at night in the rain. I just had the passenger side, rearview mirror replaced after one of those bad boys inadvertently squeezed me into a traffic cone while crossing a bridge in repair that tore it right off. That wasn’t fun. And three weeks ago, while heading home after Sunday worship, no sooner had I entered the Pike than my brakes totally gave up the ghost. Seems a faulty gasket let all the brake fluid leak out over the weekend after just being repaired so that on my ride home – in the rain at twilight – well… I had to give thanks to God for my old school driver’s ed, believe me, and what-ever was left of my emergency brake, too!
But those autumn trees – or once in late February when they were shrouded in ice: when the sun came up over the mountain – totally breath-taking. I can’t help but think of something the late Henri Nouwen wrote about autumn maybe years ago when he noted that our fall foliage was a lesson in the beauty of letting go: Many leaves contain yellow and orange pigments all year round, but in the spring and summer they’re masked by the vivid greens of chlorophyll.
That’s the pigment responsible for the absorption of light to provide energy for photosynthesis. But as the days shorten and the temperature falls, the chlorophyll breaks down and drains away and those yellows and oranges begin to shine through. They were there all along, quiet and un-noticed, but now they emerge as the green curtain fades. If God is a painter of autumn trees, what we see is an art not of addition but of subtraction. It’s an art of revelation, of revealing the hidden beauty of what was already there. So, too, for the reds and purples: as the chlorophyll fades, the remaining sugar in their leaves is transformed into a flavonoid called anthocyanin that protects the leaves from the sun as it starts to fade into winter. Nouwen noted that the Divine Artist not only paints by revelation, but also by transformation, protection, and subtraction.
My soul revels in the wisdom God shares with us in nature: there’s a beauty, stability and awe that helps keep me grounded. And I find a measure of comparable beauty in the rhythms of the church year: our liturgical journey with Jesus that begins with his birth, continues with his death, and then mystically moves us into his resurrection and beyond. Today opens a unique, sacramental mini-season that simultaneously evokes both endings and beginnings. All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints and All Souls Day kick off a four-week sojourn into the close of the church year at the end of this month on Christ the King Sunday, and, the opening of a new cycle as Advent re-turns on the first Sunday of December.
My ancient Celtic ancestors called this month a liminal season, Samhain, where natural and spiritual light is diminished, the mystery of darkness invites us into a deeper trust, and any division between the living and dead shrinks. This holy time is called Caol Ait (culleeth) in Gaelic meaning a “thin place” where the distance between heaven and earth collapses. Like the earth itself which celebrates the cycle of life, the church year in November likewise offers us a sacramental insight into the joy and grief that swirls within us as we re-member our beloved departed. Poet John O’Donohue said:
May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten. May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo. May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you continue to dwell.
I hear this proclaimed obliquely in today’s gospel from St. Mark where Jesus celebrates rather than excoriates one of the Pharisaical scholars of ancient Judaism. Often, he tells us: You have heard it said in tradition THIS… but I say unto you THAT. But today, Jesus praises this elder saying: Today you are not far from the kingdom. This isn’t an act of abstract ideology or a solidarity of race, class, gen-der, culture or religion. Rather, it’s Jesus showing us that God’s grace can and does break through to us in the most unexpected places: it could appear among the Pharisees who regularly oppose him, another time in a Gentile woman at the well or even a Roman centurion from the occupation army with a dying child. In each of these – and a host of other examples – Jesus makes allies among ALL types of people who willingly open their hearts and minds to God’s unconditional mercy. And I suspect that many of us have experienced something of this, too from a whole HOST of people who have made God’s love real for us even when we’re at our worst.
They might be elderly wisdom-keepers or young holy fools, old souls regardless of age incarnating the insights of the seasons or wee’uns filled with an exuberance and innocent zest for all that is noble, true, beautiful, good, and loving. In a moment I am going to invite you to share the name of one such saint who has touched your life but now no longer tarries with us physically. That’s part of the charism of All Saints and All Souls Day: we can call into consciousness that great cloud of witnesses who have crossed over into glory yet continue to pray and bless us beyond our awareness.
· And ONE of those all too human but holy salty saints in my life was Michael Daniels of blessed memory. Sadly, he passed from this life into life eternal alone – without a blood family or church home – he was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in Cleveland about 15 years ago. I met Mike one October night maybe 30 years ago night when his wife, Cheryl, called our church to tell us that her father (an in-active member) had recently died. She requested a pastoral visit to plan his memorial service, and I agreed to go than night with NO idea what I was getting myself into.
· I arrived at their modest home and found it pitch black – no welcome lights on outside – and precious few lit on the inside. I knocked, rang the bell, and eventually Michael opened the door looking whacked out, wild-eyed, and distraught. He was about THIS tall and the blackest man I have ever met. Without a word, he motioned me inside while Cheryl got herself presentable, silently directing me to take a seat on the sofa that he proceeded to clear off. Empty pizza boxes were tossed on the floor, a few crumpled newspapers, too. And in the process, he nonchalantly uncovered a pistol buried under the trash. I didn’t know if it was loaded or not but for a moment, I sensed I was about to meet my maker.
· Thank GOD Mike eventually picked the revolver up, put safety on, and placed it into a desk drawer. To say that an unexpected relationship began with Mike would be an understatement: after we got Cheryl’s dad buried, Mike and Cheryl started attending worship. Now, both he and she, beloved children of our Living God, were hard core alcoholics with a host of mental health is-sues. To make a LONG story a bit shorter, after about two years, Cheryl went off her meds, as so often happens, disappeared into the streets of Cleveland, and was consumed for a few sad months by the worst of her untreated schizophrenia.
I regularly helped Michael search for her over the course of two months and eventually, finding her sleeping rough in a bus stop, we got Cheryl to the hospital and back on her meds. After they were reunited and settled again, one Saturday morning when Mike went out for cigarettes, Cheryl’s demons got the best of her again and in her agony swallowed a bullet from that same pistol. When Mike got home 15 minutes later, and she was dead, a hurricane of tragedy unfolded as the police arrived and arrested him on suspicion of murder, the landlord threw all of his belonging out of their second story apartment onto the street where the neighborhood junkies had a field day gathering up all that might be valuable. By the time I got him bailed out of jail everything he’d owned had been stolen, his wife was dead, and he was now homeless.
In those days I was a young, earnest, quasi-evangelical pastor committed to the spirit of Jesus, so I naively brought him home with me to camp out on our living room floor – which, as you might imagine – simply thrilled my wife and two daughters. It was not a permanent solution, of course, and a few days later I got him into a halfway house. The only condition for remaining in their shelter was that Mike get and stay clean – which he did in a dry drunk for two days. He got busted, received his one and only warning, but couldn’t keep it together for long – and three days later was tossed out on the streets again because of his drinking.
After I picked him up, we sat in my car – and wept – both of us. I eventually said: Michael, I love you like a brother, and I want the best for you. But I can’t put you up in my house again and we’ve run out of options… except for this: I could, right now, drive you to the county hospital and get you into their rehab unit. Or, you can open that door and walk away from me forever til you get clean. For what seemed like a month, but was probably only a minute, we sat in my car with our tears and the silence until he said quote: Brother James, let’s give it a go. I done lost everything already; what more can I lose? We drove in silence to Cuyahoga County General Hospital where I dropped him off with NO sense he would make it – but after 28 days he came out clean and sober.
And Michael maintained his sobriety for another 25 years, praise God! Little by little, he mov-ed BACK into the land of the living and we grew closer. He often spent holidays with my family. Often he taught me about how to live a 12 Step spiritually in his new life of sobriety. And loved to tell me that I was too damn smart for my own good because, and this is crucial, be-cause I believed I could think my way out of all my fears, shame, and wounds. He was right, of course, and because I am a slow learner, stubborn, and sometimes too full of myself it took another 15 years before, I too began to work the 12 Steps.
When ministry took me away to Arizona and then to Massachusetts, on the anniversary of his sobriety, Michael Daniels would call me. Until… he didn’t. At a conference in Cleveland, I was told by a mutual friend that my old buddy had passed. Our old church home had merged with another, and Mike didn’t fit into their prissy piety so quit attending and with no blood family or spiritual home… Michael died alone. All that I had left of our friendship was one squirrely picture taken of Mike at a church picnic and the love and wisdom we once shared now experienced only in absentia.
That’s when All Saints Day began to matter to me – the sacred invitation to remember our loved ones who’ve crossed over in-to God’s eternal love – so every year I raise a smile, a candle, and a prayer for Michael Daniels. He became one of my mentors – a gritty little wisdom-keeper of sorts – who kept challenging me with love and humor to deal with my brokenness, my addiction to work, my fears and angst. His inner peace was hard won, but like the wisdom-keeper in today’s gospel, it was clear that God’s kingdom had come close. And I’ll bet there are people YOU would like to remember and honor this day, too. People who have loved you, touched your heart, and brought you shelter from the storm. The artist and author, Jan Richardson, said it best: "It’s HARD but HOLY to honor our beloved dead."
They make different claims, offer comforts that do not feel comfortable at the first. They do not let you remain numb. Neither do they allow you to languish forever in your grief. They will safe-guard your sorrow but will not permit that it should become your new country, your home, They knew you first in joy, in delight, and though they will be patient when you travel by other roads, it is here that they will wait for you, here they can best be found here the river runs deep with gladness, the water over each stone singing your unforgotten name.
So, let’s share some of those names – not all the stories – let’s simply say aloud ONE name, which we’ll hold for a moment together in sacred silence, At the close, we’ll lift up a prayer of gratitude for all we’ve named as well as those still silently alive in our hearts…
They make different claims, offer comforts that do not feel comfortable at the first. They do not let you remain numb. Neither do they allow you to languish forever in your grief. They will safe-guard your sorrow but will not permit that it should become your new country, your home, They knew you first in joy, in delight, and though they will be patient when you travel by other roads, it is here that they will wait for you, here they can best be found here the river runs deep with gladness, the water over each stone singing your unforgotten name.
So, let’s share some of those names – not all the stories – let’s simply say aloud ONE name, which we’ll hold for a moment together in sacred silence, At the close, we’ll lift up a prayer of gratitude for all we’ve named as well as those still silently alive in our hearts…
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Let us pray: Gracious and Tender, Loving and Faithful God, when we hear the word "saint" we often associate it with those who no longer walk this earth, who are dwelling in eternal rest. We can think of many people in our own lives who had an impact with us, whom we cannot wait to see them again. Lord, we have named some today, those we dearly miss who are no longer here on earth. But we rejoice that they no longer experience pain or shed any tears of sadness. They have shaped us to be more like you, and for this we will forever return thanks. (And from Jan Richardson)
For those who walked with us, this is our prayer.
For those who have gone ahead, this is our blessing.
For those who touched and tended us, who lingered with us
while they lived, this is our thanksgiving.
For those who journey still with us n the shadows of awareness,
in the crevices of memory, in the landscape of our dreams,
this is a benediction offered in the presence of Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
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