“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly one… for [God] hath prepared for them a city”
Fall, the season of harvest, the time of gathering, is also the time of barrenness, of the stark and grey emptiness of nature’s year. After the fruits of creation have been gathered in, the fields and gardens lie barren, desolate and emptied of their summer glory. The glorious and colourful array of the autumn leaves quickly give place to the sombre greyness of the twilight of the year.
Yet beyond the gathering of the fruits of creation, there is the spiritual gathering of the fruit of our lives to Christ even if we are in “the twilight of such day,/As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by-and-by black night doth take away,/Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest,” the twilight days and years of our lives, as Shakespeare puts it. The point is that there is a gathering of our souls into a communion and a community. It is a community of spirit, of love. If in Shakespeare’s sonnet (Sonnet 73) our perception of the passage of time makes “thy love more strong, /To love that well which thou must leave ere long,” in the Communion of Saints we are being called to the community of spirit in which our loves are eternal.
Jesus gathers us into the barn and grace of his kingdom. King and Shepherd, city and country are joined in his kingdom. He makes something glorious out of the seeming barrenness of our lives, come what may. There is a gathering of the fruit of human lives unto life eternal.
The Octave of All Saints celebrates the great festival of spiritual harvest, the gathering of all who have gone forth in Christ’s name and in whom we see something of the light of Christ shining forth through them. It extends to an Octave and to this day, The Octave Day of All Saints, which is about a kind of homecoming of spirit realized in “a better country, that is, an heavenly one,” in fact, “a city,” which is nothing less than a spiritual community and one in which we remember with gratitude those who have gone before us and into whose labour we have entered. That idea extends to Remembrance Day this week which is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. We remember those who made the supreme sacrifice for their country in the defining conflicts of the twentieth century and now, too, the twenty-first century. We remember them to God in the Christian understanding.
St. John, in his great vision of heaven which we heard last week, pictures a city at the center of which is a garden. City and country are not opposed but reconciled. The image speaks volumes to our contemporary dilemmas and present day policies, in both Church and State, which denigrate the countryside for the sake of the city. The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the pilgrimage of our souls in terms of a desire “for a better country” which is the city of God. This city in the country, this country in the city, is the desire of the saints and it must be our desire as well. We are at one with them in their desires, for what they show us is the true nature of the desires of our humanity. “They”, we, “desire a better country, that is an heavenly … for [God] has prepared for them”, for us, “a city”.
We celebrate today our citizenship in that city, in what we profess in the Creed as The Communion of Saints. We are one with them in our prayers and praises in seeking what they enjoy – simply the perfect will of God in whom we find our perfection. The Prayer Book allows on The Octave Day of All Saints for these propers from Hebrews and John’s Gospel to be read at a second service; hence, this service.
That city, which is the unity of all human endeavour and its true meaning in the divine fellowship of the Trinity, is an apostolic city and one in which we are fed by Christ whose food is “to do the will of him who sent [him].” That must be our purpose, too. Such are the conditions of our spiritual life in the spiritual communion of saints.
Such conditions and commitments stand in complete contrast and as a necessary counter to the unreal city of our contemporary lives, to what T. S. Eliot famously named in his eponymous poem, “The Wasteland”. The wasteland of modernity is the “Unreal City” where, as he says “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over the London Bridge,” a crowd, he suggests, that are really the walking dead. Quoting Dante’s vision of the souls in the vestibule of Hell, those who are unable to commit to anything, distracted and vainly running after this fancy and that fad, the whirling banners of opinions, he says, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (‘The Burial of the Dead’, The Wasteland). It is a strong critique of our world. Yet, over and against such somber reflections, the Communion of Saints shows us an even greater gathering, the gathering of our redeemed humanity united to God and with God in the will and purpose of God for our humanity. Such is the nature of our life in the real city, the city of God.
We come to that city through the Apostles sent by Jesus, “as the Father has sent me, even so send I you”. The Church must be in the land, in all the places of our lives, in country and seaside, in mountain and valley, in town and city, for in the mission of the Church, there is the city of our apostolic fellowship; there is the vision of the blessedness and the picture of the perfection of our humanity; there is the end of our life made present in prayer and praise, in the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated.
What do the Gospels show us? What do the Epistles, particularly St. Paul’s, show us? What do The Acts of the Apostles show us? What do The Letter to the Hebrews and The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine show us?
The Gospels show Jesus travelling all over the map of the ancient Holy Land – upon the mountain tops, upon the plains, upon the seashore, on ships, on foot, on the back of a donkey, in the villages and towns, in the garden of Gethsemane, in the temple at Jerusalem, and outside the city at Calvary, crucified; in short, Jesus walks the face of all creation and upon all the places that representatively belong to our humanity.
And The Epistles of St. Paul, that Apostle to the Gentiles, what do they show us? Simply the spread of the Gospel of Christ throughout the whole of the Mediterranean world and, ultimately, to Rome from which that Gospel will travel on Roman roads to shape what will become a Christian world, the world of which we, too, are the inheritors. And likewise, Hebrews, The Revelation of St. John, and most especially, The Acts of the Apostles, detail something of the spread of that Word and that vision of our redeemed humanity.
For what we celebrate is nothing less than the vision of our redeemed humanity. On the Octave Day of The Feast of All Saints we catch a glimpse and celebrate the true vision and vocation of our humanity, redeemed and sanctified, gathered in from all the countries and places of our lives, gathered into the celebration of the Communion of Saints, that blessed company who are “before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them”. It is our vocation, the vocation of our humanity. We desire what is not and cannot be of our own making. We can only enter into what God provides for us and “he hath prepared for [us] a city”.
“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly one… for [God] hath prepared for them a city”
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of All Saints’, 10:30am
Nov. 8th, 2015