Christ Church

“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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“And the wall of the city had twelve foundations,
and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb”

The feast of St. Simon and St. Jude completes the parade of Apostolic Saints that bring us to the Feast of All Saints, the celebration of the Apostolic city and fellowship in the Communion of All Saints.  All that really can be said about St. Simon and St. Jude has to do with their apostleship. They simply belong to the company of “twelve poor men, by Christ anointed,” as the hymn (# 200) puts it. What more needs to be said than that?

Their names have been given to certain features of human life as patron saints, symbols, we might say, of some aspect or other of the virtues of Christ individually considered. St. Simon, the patron saint of zealots; St. Jude, more curiously, is the patron saint of lost causes, sometimes something with which I have more than a passing acquaintance, though there is nothing in the readings for their feast that suggests anything of these attributes or associations. Yet the zealous passion for a perfect political and social and spiritual righteousness often complements the despair at lost causes that often accompanies such worthy and necessary aspirations. Ultimately, such zeal brings us to the true righteousness of Christ, realized in the city of heavenly Jerusalem. What we have here is only “the unreal city,” as T.S. Eliot memorably puts it. For “here we have no continuing city” (Heb. 13.14).

“Zeal for thine house hath even eater me,” the psalmist says (Ps. 69.9). Yet through a myriad of lost causes, the deeper yearning for peace and righteousness is glimpsed, the deeper yearning which belongs to a peace, “not as the world giveth,” but as Christ gives.

The focus is on the Apostolic Foundation of the Church and the end of our humanity. Apostolic Foundation and Apostolic Fellowship are two realities which we badly need to recover and reclaim. Without them our parishes, our communities, our institutions become either the mental ghettoes of passive nihilism, empty, angry and in despair, or the activist sects and cells of active nihilism trumpeting any number of a myriad of the social and political agendas of the day at the expense of the spiritual vision of redeemed humanity which is ours to proclaim. We are too much with ourselves because we are not with God.

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