Christ Church

“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

Mercy is not only at the center of the Beatitudes; it underlies and shapes all the Beatitudes from beginning to end. The truth and dignity of our humanity is found in blessedness, especially the blessedness of suffering, as we explored last Sunday, paradoxically as that seems. Yet that is the more transcendent form of blessedness that belongs to the good of our humanity in the immediacy and immanence of the divine found in human experience but only as its corrective and its redemption. The unity of the communion of saints is ultimately grounded in the unity of God. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus says. Thus, the Beatitudes provide a way to think about the difficult things of suffering, like persecution and loss without being defined by them, and even to things like war and its atrocities. These are the things that Remembrance Day properly concerns and which should concern us. It is certainly not about the glorification of war.

Beginning in the mid-11^th century in western Christianity, The Festival of All Saints was followed by The Solemnity of All Souls. The remembering of all the faithful departed and of human mortality is embraced within the Communion of Saints. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews tells us and speaks explicitly of those who suffered (Heb. 11. 32-37), even those “of whom the world was not worthy” (vs. 38) who are understood to be enrolled in that so “great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12, 1) which concludes the Epistle. It signifies the hope of “a sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). All Souls’ was part of the Cluniac Reform of the Benedictine order initiated by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (c. 962-1048). The thread of glory runs through the grave of our common mortality. It became, more or less, universally observed in the West by the 13^th century and, perhaps, inspired such deeply reflective hymns like Dies Irae (1260) “Day of wrath, O day of mourning” on the theme of judgement and death sung in Advent and at requiems.

For our contemporary world, these ways of thinking have been associated with Remembrance Day, ever since November 11^th, 1918, the end of the First World War. Remembrance Day is really a secular form of All Souls’ Day. We gather at cenotaphs, the empty tombs, in our communities where the names are written of those who left our communities, our churches, our schools, and went off to the ‘great wars’ that have had such a profound and devastating effect upon our contemporary world. They didn’t return. That is the point. Our Maritime communities are defined in no small measure by the immensity of their sacrifice, a sacrifice in the sense of commitment to what they thought was significant and worth dying for, to some extent or another, in all of the confused mixture of motives and intent that belonged to the forms of cultural and communal identities. It was not about the later abstractions of democracy and freedom. To read the names at the Windsor cenotaph is to be reminded of all the little places in Hants County from which they came and to realize in a moment how entire generations were wiped out; a legacy of loss that has affected those communities to this day.

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“These are they which came out of great tribulation”

In the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, there is a gathering, the greatest of all gatherings. It is All Saints, the celebration of the Communion of Saints, the spiritual fellowship of all creation with God the Blessed Trinity. It is the gathering of all things back into unity in God from whom and for whom all things exist and have their being. It is the gathering of all gatherings, we might say. We have had the gathering of Harvest Thanksgiving, the gathering of national Thanksgivings, the gathering of St. Michael and All  Angels, strong testaments to the spiritual nature of all reality. Those gatherings of nature, of the rational forms of our social and political lives, of the spiritual company of Angels, find their fulness of meaning in the greater spiritual harvest gathering and celebration of All Saints.

And yet, how challenging and even disturbing. It seems to turn the world on its head, an inversion of everything we take for granted. But that is the deeper point of religion and faith that at once shapes culture, to be sure, but even more profoundly, necessarily and constantly counters culture. Our readings in the last several months in the Offices from various books of the Hebrew Scriptures provide an endless and constant critique of human behaviour in our failure to attend to the Word and Spirit of God whether in the rise and fall of empires or in the ups and downs of the fortunes of Israel, but always in the form of a critique, noting the constant failures of Israel and the presumption and pride of other cultures; think of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel or Haman in the Book of Esther. Yet such readings are a constant reminder of what is ultimately true and salvific for us: our good as found in the endless love of God and in the divine restraintand compassion that constantly seeks our good in spite of ourselves and the vagaries of history. We learn precisely through the pride and pretensions of human sinfulness about the greater and transformative power and truth of God.

What we learn is the counter to all of the forms of reductive thinking about what it means to be truly human. Biology is not simply and completely our destiny. You are not merely some kind of algorithm, a mathematical formula; you are not some random collection of molecules or pathogens floating around in a meaningless void like cosmic orphans adrift in a meaningless universe. You are more though not less than such things including the things of human experience, the things of sin and evil, of suffering and loss. And all for one simple reason: none of these things capture the dignity of our humanity. All Saints’ Day signals the vocation of our humanity: we are called to be saints; to know ourselves as part of a greater community of spirit and fellowship grounded in nothing less than the life of God imagined as a city. How? Paradoxically and profoundly through suffering as the readings for this great festival make abundantly clear.

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