For All the Saints

Protestants aren’t much for All Saints Day.  The tradition of saints is associated mostly with our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers.  We might think of Saint Francis of Assisi because of his prayer, which incidentally he didn’t write, but that’s beside the point.

In addition, saints seem foreign to our everyday experience. They lived long ago and were somehow different from us mere mortals.  Those who manage to be canonized in the complicated process of the Catholic Church are folks we don’t fancy ourselves to resemble, but I think we are missing the boat.  There is a rich tradition of saints that belongs to all people of faith, a biblical tradition found in numerous places in the New Testament.

The saints, most simply, are those who love God.  That’s it, those who love God.  That makes the whole idea of saints a lot more real.

I first learned about the saints in the little UCC church in Somersville, CT, where I grew up.  It is the mill village on the west side of the town proper.

This little church was peopled with farmers and builders, truck drivers like my father and stay-at-home moms like my mother.  The mill that once employed most of the people in the village stood vacant, just down the road near the waterfall that had once powered the machines that made the wool.  It was a simple place filled with people of uncomplicated faith and a kind of down-home way of being in the world.

I learned about God by watching God’s people in that place.  The church had its share of squabbles and petty nonsense like every church, but at the end of the day we found our center in that simple sanctuary with the wheezing Wurlitzer and a well-intentioned, if slightly off key choir. Ministers came and went.  Some were pretty good and others not so much, but each of them offered something to the mix of  community that found its stability in the God who called us together.  The place is pretty much the same, even to this day. The youth group kids of fifty years ago remain my friends.   

During my youth, there were people who had been members for fifty or sixty years who carried the history of the place in their bones. Now my dad is the fifty-year member who carries that memory for the generations that are coming behind him.

We learn about faith from watching those who live it.  And we are the canvas on which others learn to draw their pictures of God and live the life of discipleship. 

The early Christians we read about in scripture had no special training. They were not without flaws and failures and fears.  They were human beings living out the faith while in search of the faith, as Frederick Beuchner observed, leaning on one another to be the lens through which the goodness and grace of God came into focus. Their love for God was manifest in the way they lived, how they treated one another and the quality of community they created.  It was at once deeply human and profoundly holy.

Celebrating the saints is about remembering those who walked with us and helped form the path we follow.  Celebrating the saints is about God’s persistence in raising up the teachers and models and proclaimers of the word we need for the sake of the Word we become to others.

Take a moment and call those people to mind and let them wash over your heart in gratitude.  Outside of your family, who taught you the faith and modeled the faith?  What community formed you?  Let the names rise from your heart to your lips.  Speak the names aloud.

The names are a whispered prayer of gratitude.

All Saints Day is also an invitation to look at how we are walking through this life. It is also a time to wonder how our days will mark the paths of those who follow us in the life of faithfulness.

Our time, this day, is in desperate need of people of faith to embody the Word in the world.  The religious nuts out there who get the most attention do not speak for us, but if we do not speak our faith, that voice wins.

In short, this is a day to celebrate our togetherness across the generations.  Richard Rohr reminds us, “living in the communion of saints means we can take ourselves very seriously because we are part of the Great Whole.  It also means we cannot take ourselves too seriously because we are part of the Great Whole.”  The place that is ours is uniquely ours and the place that belongs to others is uniquely their own. 

In the economy of God’s grace the whole does not come to pass without all the witnesses of all the generations.  The richness of the saints is unfolded in particular moments that are gone as soon as they come, but they leave permanent marks on our soul. 

All Saints Day is our invitation to remember our uniqueness and the authenticity of our own witness as much as it is about remembering the witness of others through the years.  It is a funky time warp where we keep company with those who have gone before us and those who walk beside us.

Time has a way of erasing the irrelevant. What remains is the essence of our witness. In the end, what we leave behind is the love that is entrusted to us, the love that makes us human, the love that breaks our heart and heals it only to break it again.  In the end, the saints are those who love God.  And that is one wild ride.  To sing a song of the saints of God is to sing the song of humanness gathered up in holiness, love transforming what is less than lovely and light shining in the darkness.