The Grey Month of our Remembering
“Golden October declin[es] into sombre November”, T.S. Eliot suggests in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Yet the Beatitudes of the Gospel of All Saints’ Day open us out to a profound form of thinking about the radical nature of human freedom and human nature. It is central to the Christian idea of the Communion of Saints which embraces the whole of humanity in the vision of its unity and perfection, a vision which is universal. “The great multitude whom no one could number” are those “who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”, an image of redemption that challenges and counters the various dystopias of our times.
The point is fairly simple: we are not defined simply by the things that happen to us in the ups and downs of human life, let alone the fickleness and chaos of human experience and the human heart. This is nothing new, of course, but how we think and face them is another matter. That is where the Beatitudes come so strongly to the fore. It is not just that they turn the world upon its head, which they do, but that they speak to the more radical idea of the perfection and redemption of our desires. In that sense, it is about a sense of homecoming, a sense of belonging that recalls us to who we are. The Greek word for truth is aletheia which literally means an unforgetting, in short, a remembering, albeit one which happens in and through the awareness of our forgetting. We forget who we are in the sight of God and that carries over into our forgetting of the nature of our companionship and communion with one another.
All Saints in both its sacred and secular forms is about a kind of homecoming of the spirit in which we rediscover the necessity and the significance of our commitments to one another. It is really all about the realization that we are part of a community that is far greater than we are. It is really all about the realization that we are more though not less than our bodies and worldly experiences. To recall who we are in the sight of God is to grasp the principle of freedom and purpose in our lives as agents, but only within the greater agency of God.
For that is the point about All Saints and All Souls. We are part of a community far greater than ourselves, a company no one could number, as John the Divine puts it in his marvelous vision of what we seek and to which we belong. Learning to act out of the vision of the Communion of Saints means being attentive to the primacy of the ethical, to the idea of the Good and the struggle to let that live and move in us. One of the great lessons of the Beatitudes has to do with the strength of inwardness that they highlight over and against outward things, the things that belong to circumstance, the things that happen to us. The Beatitudes highlight the fact that these spiritual qualities of soul are what define us rather than the events of our world and day.
Paradoxically, in their inwardness they call us together as social and spiritual beings. The inwardness of the Beatitudes joins us together rather than separating us from one another. They join us together in ways which belong to the truth of our individuality. The truth of ourselves as selves can only happen in our encounter and relation with other selves. Here the self-consciousness of the Beatitudes, if you will, belongs even more to our God-consciousness.
It is not simply about the finite seen in contrast to the infinite but about how the finite participates in God’s infinity without which it has no truth or being. “A great multitude which no man could number” points beyond the technocratic culture of our times which, in a way, is all number, all a matter of binary function, as it were. This is a limited way of thinking that diminishes our humanity. “I am not a Number” is the striking title of an illustrated and personal story about an eight-year old indigenous child in Canada’s Residential School system. It echoes disturbingly the numbering and tattooing by number of the victims of the Shoah, the Holocaust. The book is in our library. The point is that we are more than a number. The Octave of All Saints opens us out to a larger view of our humanity as a corrective to our sins and follies.
The imaginary of All Saints is reflected to some extent at the School. Here we have students from a great range of “nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues”; in short, cultures and languages from all over the world. Here students are reminded that they are part of a much larger community of souls who have sat where they sit in Chapel, some of whom went off from those pews into the great and defining conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and didn’t return.
The sacred Octave of All Saints carries over into the sombre observances of Remembrance Day, itself a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. In it we are reminded of another feature of John’s vision about sacrifice and service, about character and inward conviction. Such things are profoundly humbling. They are a necessary reminder about the qualities of character that belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity. November is the grey month of remembering which recalls us to truth, to our unforgetting, and thus to our knowing of who we are in the sight of God and with one another, “in prayer and praise, in learning and serving”.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher,
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy