Month: November 2016

“Who are these?”

The Festival of All Saints in all of its richness and glory provides us with the best if not the only reason to love the Church and a counter to all of the reasons to hate the Church. The vision of the communion of saints is the vocation of our humanity. We are reminded of the forms of our spiritual fellowship that properly define the end and purpose of our lives. In prayer and praise, we participate in that heavenly city and community even now. In the greyness of nature’s year, in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, we celebrate the spiritual gathering that is our homeland, the homeland of the spirit.

Our evening readings complement the powerful lessons which belong to All Saints’ Day. The lesson from Revelation echoes the reading tonight from Second Esdras about “a multitude” which cannot be numbered who are those who have “put off mortal clothing and put on the immortal” and have “confessed the name of God”. It is a vision of the confessing Church in its truth and glory. The lesson from Revelation expands on the nature of that confession. It is about the praise and worship of “our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb”, images that extend the concept of “the Son of God” who is “in their midst” in Second Esdras. It becomes a reference to Christ and to our fellowship in and with Jesus Christ, “the author and the finisher of our faith”, as the lesson from Hebrews reminds us, a lesson, too, which complements, it seems to me, the rich and powerful Sermon on the Mount centered on the Beatitudes which is the Gospel for All Saints’ Day.

“Who are these?” Second Esdras asks, a question which Revelation takes up with even greater intensity. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?” A rhetorical question, it is answered with the profound insight that “these are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” extending and developing further the idea in Second Esdras of having “put off mortal clothing and put on immortal”. Somehow it is in and through suffering, not unlike the examples of suffering which the lesson from Hebrews enumerates: “mockings and scourgings,” being “chain[ed] and imprison[ed], stoned and sawn in two, killed with the sword, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, those whom the world was not worthy.” Quite a list of nasties and yet all those forms of suffering are drawn into and belong to the sufferings of Christ who “endured the cross, despising the shame”. No glory apart from the litany of suffering.

And that is a hard lesson for our times and yet a most necessary lesson.

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“If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole”

It is a most touching scene, if you will pardon the pun. But here is a story about someone who is suffering terribly and who has suffered “with an issue of blood twelve years” and who seeks healing not by the touch of Jesus but just by touching his garment. As touching as her faith is, it is a long ways from what Paul seeks for us in his letter to the Colossians, namely, our being “filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all wisdom and understanding” without which there cannot be that greater wholeness for our humanity, namely, our being made “meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light”. The wholeness that this woman seeks belongs to the vocation of our humanity realised in the communion of saints. It means a deeper understanding of human suffering and of human redemption, a deeper understanding of healing; ultimately it means an understanding of death and resurrection even in the face of scorn and mockery.

Our readings this morning can be seen in the light of the scripture readings that belong to the Festival of All Saints. It extends to an octave, eight days of consideration about the vocation of our humanity. For that is what All Saints is all about. We are offered a vision of heaven but not at the expense of the realities of suffering and death. All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls which recalls our common mortality, for example. The Octave of All Saints’ prepares us, it seems to me, for a kind of secular All Souls’ Day in the commemorations that belong to Remembrance Day in our culture. There is something deeply spiritual about such things that speak directly and profoundly to an understanding of our humanity in its truth and dignity in and through the awful spectacles of death and destruction in the wars of the world.

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What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they?

“Our revels now are ended”, it seems, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest. All the fuss and fun, fantasy and delight, horror and scare of Halloween is past. But is it? Or are only the ways in which contemporary culture co-opts the real meaning of Halloween finally over and finished, perhaps? What really is Halloween all about? Teaching children to become beggars and terrorists? Trick or Treat? All in the service of the candy world? Another commercial venture in pursuit of profit? There is no doubt that a number of events and activities have become associated with Halloween. But are they what it is really all about?

It is interesting to see how certain customs and practices arise and dominate our imaginations. In a way, Halloween has become hijacked to other secondary aspects and features of something else, something much more profound and significant which is easily lost from view. The point here is not to declaim against its ludic qualities – the sense of play and especially the play of the imagination signalled in masks and costumes, for instance. No. There is a deeper point captured in a wonderful Latin phrase. Abusus non tollit usum. The abuse or misuse of something does not take away from its proper use.

This is wisdom. We live in a world where all kinds of things are misused, a world where there is an abuse of language, of the world itself, of ourselves and of one another. The answer is not to be proscriptive but to recover a deeper sensibility and understanding of the better and proper use and purpose of things. And so, with Halloween. It is important to recall its truer meaning. Monday was properly speaking All Hallows’ Eve, the Eve of the Feast of All Saints in the western Christian traditions. While it connects with older themes about the borderlands between the living and the dead in many, many of the cultures of the world, it celebrates another view of our humanity than simply our mortality, another view of our humanity than the transformations of our own imaginations about ourselves. It offers us a profound vision of our humanity as a community of spirit which finds its truth in the worship and praise of God signalled in the lesson from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

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