The procession of the Saints, grim and fierce, awe-full in their splendor, a joy filled radiance that burns to the bone, dancing like a storm, solid and sturdy as the mountains, the saints of God in procession.
The Saints of God. Today we celebrate the Saints of God, the Communion of the Saints, as the creed says. By being in the body of Christ we are in communion with one another, the living and the dead, so today we celebrate that communion and the fullness of God that is Christ Jesus who fills all things. The splendor of God’s radiance overflows and creation dances with that life.
The communion of the living with dead, in Christ we are all alive.
The finality of death is ended, death has lost its sting, death has died, for as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive.
I love this day. It’s like another celebration of Easter but this time we remember and celebrate how that resurrection power of Christ spills over into all the living and the dead, one of the great mysteries of the faith.
Ultimately I think how this changes our day to day life is that the pain of loss, of grief for our dead, hurts a little bit less, because we hope for so much. And our own fear for our own end bites a little less hard.
Human culture has always been fascinated with death and the dead, take all the crazy traditions that have accumulated around All Hallows Eve, or the contemporary fascination with vampires and zombies playing off of our fear and all the mystery that shrouds death.
I don’t think I will ever become comfortable with death or consider it to be natural, I think it will always make me angry, an affront and threat to all that I love that I can’t stop anymore than I can stop the tide. I’ve noticed that my brain refuses to remember if someone is dead, I still expect to see them and talk with them. They’ll be here in just a minute. I seem to be hard wired for denial, it doesn’t matter how much dirt I cast onto someone’s coffin, my mind recoils from the rudeness of my friend not being there anymore. So I talk to the dead telling them they really need to be here.
But maybe that disconnect in my mind and that power of denial and my arguing with the dead for their failure for not being here, maybe with All Saints Day all that futility isn’t so futile, for in Christ all are made alive, and that separation we experience is only a “slight momentary affliction”, as the Apostle Paul says.
So today is one of those days of such importance that we remember and renew our own baptismal covenant, (as we baptize Jane Elizabeth), the sacrament where in we are reborn as Christ’s body.
Also, finally, part of what we do this day each year is that we have the Necrology, the reading of the dead, the study of the dead, of those who have died since last All Saints Day when I read from our parish register of burials, and we share silence and then in silence or aloud we speak the names of those others to whom we have said goodbye to this past year and lift them up and entrust their death and our living to God, who can be trusted.
All stand.
(May their souls and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.)