“What are these who are arrayed in white robes?”
It is “that time of year,” in Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnet # 73, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” And yet we find ourselves in a great company, the company of the saints, a company which embraces as well the solemnity of All Souls, the remembrance of our common mortality, the picture of death without which All Saints becomes simply an escape and a fantasy rather than a reality.
November is the barren month, to be sure, with the leaves all scattered on the wind and the fields all stripped of the harvest fruits, and where nature slowly settles into its winter’s sleep. In contrast to those natural themes we are recalled to our spiritual vocation and home. The vocation of our humanity is the call to holiness. “What are these?” the great lesson from All Saints’ Day asks about a multitude greater than any man can number. The same question is before us on All Souls’ Day. We try in our own poor way to remember those who have gone before us and whom we have known only to discover the frailties of our memories. Thus All Souls’ equally reminds us of the very thing which All Saints’ celebrates: the truth of our humanity as found in God which does not negate nor deny death.
“These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” It is all about how we are defined not by the circumstances and trials and tribulations in our lives but by grace, the grace of the lamb. That is the great point of both the lesson from Wisdom tonight and the great Gospel of The Beatitudes. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It doesn’t mean that there won’t be loss and grief, suffering and death. Even more “blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There is no hiding the grim and barren realities of our world and day which witnesses more and more to the radical instability of the self, to a kind of destructive nihilism, either of one self or others. All Saints and All Souls recall us to our spiritual identity in and through the realities of our everyday lives, including death. We are being given a way to think positively and in a healthy way about death and suffering, even about sin and evil.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity,” Shakespeare suggests, drawing instinctively upon the wisdom of the great religious traditions which remind us that in and through all of the circumstances and tribulations of our lives, in and through the dark wood of human experiences in all of their distressing and desperate disarray, there is the “good in everything.” A great good known in and through the disturbing pageants of suffering. This becomes part of our witness, part of knowing that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. To know that we are know by God is our joy and delight, the joy and delight which carries us through the valley of the shadow of death, the deaths of so many, many souls. “I had not known death had undone so many,” Dante observes. The many, many souls of those who have died cannot be known to us; at best, we might remember a handful of names. Not so with God.
The mercy of this solemnity within the festival of All Saints is that they and therefore we are all known to God and loved by God. That is the one thing necessary for us to hold onto, the one thing necessary which changes everything. Such is “the good in everything.”
What are these who are arrayed in white robes?
Fr. David Curry
All Souls’ Day
November 2nd, 2017