“I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”
It is “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” In the culture of scattered souls and in the season of scattered leaves, we are gathered together. There is something more than our just being scattered, it seems. Like leaves scattered on the wind in all their colourful autumnal array, but then gathered into heaps of burnished gold, so we are gathered to celebrate the gathering into glory of the scattered fragments of our humanity. Such is the meaning of the Feast of All Saints’.
Are we simply like leaves collected into bags tossed upon some compost heap? Yes and no. The image of the story of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity as conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.
It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted – never mind the claims of connectivity. Has it never struck any one as passing strange that in the age of almost endless connectivity we have as well the culture of almost total distraction, indeed, the attention-deficit culture, par excellence? We are the culture of the connect to the disconnect.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the counter to these contemporary experiential realities is the Communion of Saints, the gathering together of the scattered leaves of the human story. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.
Of course, that begs the great and contemporary question, namely, the very idea that we are spiritual creatures and belong to a spiritual community. Is this just a dogmatic assertion? No more than the idea that we are nothing more than the random bits and bytes of matter envisioned in any number of combinations but lacking any explanatory reason. How can randomness explain our thinking being, or for that matter, any being whatsoever? How can it be anything more than an assertion of the profoundest kind of disconnect between being and knowing?
In such a view, the Feast of All Saints’ is the profoundest celebration imaginable. It speaks to our individuality as found, not in the aloneness of cosmic orphans adrift in an indifferent and unfeeling universe, but in the Communion of Saints, the company of redeemed humanity, a company defined by the communion between God and man in Jesus Christ.
“Behold … a great multitude which no man could number.” There is something more to our humanity than what can be captured by number. A recent article in the Globe and Mail comments on the irony of the pseudo-Nobel prize for economics – pseudo because the Nobel family never endowed any such prize – which went to two economists on the strength of their mathematical modelling of economic forecasts despite the fact that “the rational expectations model” and “the efficient market hypothesis” utterly fail to explain the dismal realities of the current economic world. Somehow there is something more to the desires of our human hearts than what can be captured by numbers. Even economics needs to draw upon other forms of knowing. Somehow, I find that rather refreshing.
In a cave in Switzerland, particle physicists are busy smashing sub-atomic particles in pursuit of the elusive and hypothetical Higgs-Boson particle, the so-called God particle, and in the hopes of approximating the moment of the origins of the physical universe. Yet, somewhat like Plato in The Republic, All Saints’ takes us out of the cave of such fleeting, flickering images and bids us contemplate heaven itself. It is imaged as the city of our redeemed humanity; as something more than the shadows of the movements of the tiniest quanta of the material universe. The idea here is not that the Communion of Saints repudiates either number or matter, either math or physics; quite the opposite, it offers the vision of the redemption of the whole of creation and of the whole of our humanity. It is simply about what is more than number and more than matter, not less. That is the beauty and the joy of the poetic and philosophical images that belong to the glorious festival of All Saints’. It speaks to the deeper truth and dignity of our humanity as redeemed by God and to a profound sense of the connection between being and knowing.
We may find ourselves in the dark cave of human experience. Such may be the wasteland of modernity, the nada of contemporary culture. But All Saints’ reminds us that we are called to something more. We are more than the happenstances or circumstances that so easily beset us. We belong to a spiritual fellowship and are defined by the qualities of soul that belong to the nature of that community and communion. “These are they which came out of great tribulation,” St. John tells us in his Revelation. We are more not less than simply what happens to us. And if we would understand something of what those defining qualities of soul really are, then we must attend to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, in short, to the great manifesto of Christian life and faith, the Beatitudes, which are the core of that remarkable sermon.
The Beatitudes are about far more than happiness. They are about the objective forms of blessedness. They shape an entire attitude and approach to life. They challenge the assumptions of our culture and, indeed, every culture and age. In a way, they turn the world completely on its head. Here is the counter to the culture of greed and dominance, the culture of entitlement and narcissistic self-absorption.
I have to admit that I hate Halloween but I love All Saints. What is “trick or treat” really about? What are we teaching? How to be terrorists or beggars, or both? I know it is just a night of harmless fun, traipsing along the borderlands of fantasy and reality. Still it is a great relief to turn to the holy vision of All Saints and to the idea of blessedness.
Blessedness not happiness. Happiness has a quintessentially subjective quality to it, the aspect of happenstance, as it were, captured in the word itself. Hap means chance. It makes little sense really to say ‘happy are they who mourn’ or ‘happy are they who are persecuted’. There is nothing subjectively happy about any of that at all, unless pain is your pleasure. It is a different matter to speak of blessedness. It has an essentially objective quality to it.
Take for instance the second Beatitude, “blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” Jesus meets the widow of Nain on her way to bury her only son; she is doubly bereft. When Jesus saw her, we are told, “he had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Weep not’.” It is a wonderful scene. Her circumstance is that of suffering and sorrow, of incalculable loss and sadness. How can she not weep? Indeed. But what Jesus is really saying is, ‘don’t keep on weeping’, ‘don’t always be weeping’. There is something more than our griefs and sorrows as hard as that may seem even, and especially, in those times when our hearts are full of grief. Yet, “those who mourn shall be comforted” for “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
What are we to make though of “the poor in spirit” and “the meek” as being blessed states of soul? Does that not scream “losers” in our culture? What does it mean to be “poor in spirit”? It means not to be full of yourself, so full of yourself that you are oblivious to anyone and anything else. “The poor in spirit” have the humility not to think of themselves more highly than they ought to think and to be open to the greater truth and mercy of God. Thus the kingdom of heaven is theirs. And “the meek” who “shall inherit the earth”? Ours is not a culture which prizes meekness, seeing it as a kind of weakness and helplessness. Über confidence and high self-esteem are celebrated much more. Yet, meekness here means gentleness and kindness, qualities of soul which do so much good in every aspect of our world, whether noticed or not. These are blessed qualities of character. In each case, with “the poor in spirit” and “the meek”, the blessedness lies in an openness to God and an openness to others.
It means that we are not alone but part of a glorious company who are defined by the qualities of Christ in us and not by the circumstances of everyday life. In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, greatly affected by the death of his friend and companion, Enkidu, embarks on a spiritual quest for wisdom. He goes to see Utnapishtim, the Faraway. A kind of precursor to Noah, Utnapishtim survived a great flood and to him “alone,” it is said, the gods “gave everlasting life”. He lives in “the land of Dilmun,” a place far beyond the ends of the world. But he lives alone (except for his wife). He lives far away from the city, utterly removed from the company of humanity. We may ask what kind of life that is; privileged, to be sure, and yet, rather alone.
All Saints’ is about a community, about the heavenly Jerusalem, about the city of redeemed humanity. It places us with one another in our love and praise of God. Only so can there be blessedness, the blessedness that belongs to our spiritual fellowship with all who would be defined by Christ, the qualities of whose life in us is our blessedness.
It may seem that we gather in the “bare ruined choirs” of a culture that has forgotten the spiritual principles that shape and inform a Communion. But All Saints’ reminds us of the greater reality of that Communion. It is “a great multitude, which no man could number” because it is beyond number and matter. It is a Communion defined by its openness to the wonder of God, a community lost in prayer and praise, awe and worship. “Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever and ever. Amen.” Such is our blessedness.
“I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of All Saints’
November 1st,2011
St. George’s, Halifax.