All Soul's Day
November 2, 2007
St. John's Church

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

It is a pleasure to be your guest presider and preacher this evening.  I love this beautiful space and am always happy to have cause to be here among you and especially to observe one of the feast days of the church with you.  And speaking of that, let me begin by setting the record straight once and for all:  The feast we celebrate tonight, the Commemoration of the Dead or All Souls’ Day as it is more often called is not a consolation prize for those of us who will never officially be remembered on All Saints’ Day.  Fr. Schraplau preached last night at the All Saints’ service.  So…it is quite important to me to be clear that he did not get top billing!  Regardless of what tradition suggests, yesterday was not for the big guys, the really beatified, while today is for us barely beatified.  A saint is a saint is a saint is a saint.  Or something like that.

The New Testament is clear: the word “saints” is used to describe the entire body of the Christian membership.  St. Francis and St. Buddy – hmm….  Hard to believe, but technically or more importantly theologically, Francis and Buddy are in the same category - saints.  As outrageous as that is, I like something about that – the Feast of St. Buddy or St. Buddy medals.  Probably not going to happen.  Still….a saint is a saint is a saint.

A brief word about how we got to where we are.  The truth is that almost from the beginning in the life of the church All Saints’ Day came to be associated with special Christians, the ones who lived dramatically faithful lives, the ones who deserve to be remembered through the generations, the ones the recollection of whose lives serve somehow to inspire and empower us.   Along about the 10th Century, St. Odilo of Cluny, introduced for the first time in the practice of the church the setting aside of a day, November 2nd, to remember us ordinary folks.

To be totally forthcoming, its beginning was not terribly auspicious.  Odilo heard a story of a religious pilgrim and his return home from a trip to the Holy Land.  During the trip, it seems that the pilgrim’s boat was cast by a storm ashore a desolate island.  There the pilgrim learned from a hermit, arguably not the best source, that among the rocks on the deserted island, moans and groans of ordinary people stuck in purgatory could be heard throughout the night.  The hermit, again arguably not the best source since they tend to have a special view of reality, suggested to the pilgrim that if the Christians in nearby Cluny prayed a little harder for these sad folks locked in purgatory, they might get out a bit quicker.  Upon being told this story, Odilo set aside All Souls’ Day as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the souls in purgatory, a day of community-wide praying to get their loved ones stuck in purgatory into a better state.

Little wonder then that after the Reformation, All Souls’ Day, lost some of its punch in Anglicanism.  We never took much pleasure in the notion of purgatory – particularly in light of the financial schemes devised to get those we love out of it.

And, yet, here we are celebrating All Souls’ Day all these years later – and I would say for great cause.  We are not doing so because we think we need to get anyone out of purgatory.  Save from a broadly metaphorical understanding of it as a concept with no temporal component, purgatory - happily for my money - has fallen into disrepute in all but the most…ah…shall we say “medieval” parishes. All Souls’ Day has morphed into a generalized time of commemoration.  Tonight we remember with special tenderness the ordinary folks, some whom we loved with great abandon though rarely without complication, some for whom our love was mostly complication, some the physical absence of whom is more relief than anguish, and some for whom even the recalling of their names breaks open our hearts even to this day.

These ordinary folks affect us; let there be no mistake about that.  They shape us, sometime twisting and contorting us and sometimes sculpting us into marvelous creatures we had no chance being without them.  And….then time stops for a moment, and..…from us they are gone.  Maya Angelou, the great soulful poet of our age, who should be the poet-laureate for the globe, understands how we affected by the lost of a dear soul. 

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. 
For they existed.

Thank God for those who existed in our ordinary lives.  Thank God for parents, when they were flawed and when they were so confident and loving that they all-powerful.  Thank God for lovers and spouses and partners and friends – for the richness they gave and through the memory of their existence still give. 

In our book group at Ascension, we have just concluded the reading of a book on Heaven, a book unimaginatively titled, Heaven.  Compiled by Roger Ferlo, it is a collection of essays about Heaven in particular and the notion of the afterlife in general.  Some of our denomination’s most cherished writers, Barbara Crafton, Nora Gallagher, and Martin Smith, hold forth about their hopes, dreams, and convictions about heaven.  Happily for those of us who live best in fuzzy details, deriving more comfort from a gentle not-knowing than from doctrinal certainty, the book refuses to claim much in the way of the absolute.  Descriptions of what it is like are scarce indeed, not a gold cobbled street to be found within its pages.  BUT…in every case, the underlying conviction is that however the next life unfolds it is without exception good and entails life with God in a way that we do not currently comprehend.  All of that is to say that for me these ordinary souls we recall tonight are doing just fine, thank you very much – for regardless of how grand they were or were not, not matter how impressive their faith and lives were or were not, they – as we shall be – are now with God.  That is enough for me, and my knowing of it comes from a deep place inside me that exists without need of further evidence.

Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord;

And let light perpetual shine upon them.

May the souls of all departed and particularly of those,whom we loved or wanted to love,

Through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

AMEN.