Month: November 2025

“But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

The reading from Hebrews appointed for the Octave of All Saints’ (BCP, p. 302) reminds us that “we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” Such is the Communion of Saints, a multitude beyond number comprising persons past, present, and future who are known and embraced in God’s eternal love. It is pictured as “an heavenly country,” indeed, a city, heavenly Jerusalem. It is an image of the true homeland of our humanity, the patria with God which defines the via to God, the end which orders the way. Hebrews reminds us that the conditions of our journeying belong to our participation in what Christ has accomplished for us and therefore in us.

At this point the readings for this Sunday come into play and help our thinking about what is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day, namely Remembrance Day. We endeavour to remember all those who sacrificed their lives for their country in the great, defining, and utterly devastating wars of the last century and beyond, the legacies of which remain with us in our world of endless wars. Far from a glorification of war and military power and might, it is really a remembrance of the horrors and cost of war, on the one hand, and of the dedication and sacrifice for the sake of others for what they took to be good and true, on the other hand. Timothy Findley’s classic Canadian anti-war novel, The Wars, reflects profoundly on the technology of war which destroys both the natural world and our humanity, turning what is life-giving into what is life-destroying. It is about us but the novel counsels against falling into the tragedy of victimhood which negates our agency and dignity; instead the challenge is “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived,” a life lesson for all of us in the face of the ugly spectacle of human sin and evil that bedevils us all.

We are asked to remember the many hundreds of thousands who went forth from our communities to fight and die in the World Wars in far away lands for what they thought was worth fighting for; in so doing we place them in the greater struggle for good over evil in our own hearts and lives. In other words, the real causes of the wars and conflicts of our world are ultimately spiritual. Thus Hebrews bids us “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” This is to transcend the divisions and animosities of countries and cultures but only by looking beyond ourselves to Christ Jesus, the alpha and omega of all creation and of our lives in faith. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews says, referring to the pageant of Old Testament figures, named and unnamed, who are gathered into the greater sacrifice of Christ.

It is all about faith which Hebrews defines as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Heb. 11.1). We are more not less than the material and economic circumstances of our lives that become so often the occasion for sin and violence. We go from last Sunday’s images of “putting off mortality” and “putting on immortality”, from being “knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ”, from the theme of the “wedding-garment”, emblematic of our participation in the marriage feast, to the powerful imagery of the panoply of war. “Put on the whole armour of God,” Paul bids us, “above all, taking the shield of faith.”

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“Blessed are you”

The soft autumnal colours of October give way to the sombre grey of November. There is a meditative and contemplative quality to this time of year “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,” as Shakespeare so memorably puts it.

His whole sonnet (#73) applies the imagery of the dying of nature’s year to human mortality, seeing in ourselves “that time of year,” “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west,” and “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consum’d with what which it was nourish’d by.” Though beautifully put, such observations are rather commonplace in the poetic, philosophic and biblical traditions. “Lord, what is man,” the Psalmist asks “that thou hast such respect unto him, or the son of man, that thou so regardest him?” and answers that “man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away as a shadow” (Ps. 144, 3-4). There is no escaping the reality of human mortality.

The sonnet ends on a different note that suggests a deeper sensibility about the perceptions of mortality pointing to something greater. “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” These poetic reflections “make [our] love more strong” and challenge us “to love that well which [we] must leave ere long.” That the world, ourselves, and others are to be loved well even in the face of mortality indicates that they are worthy of love. That can only be so, because they are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Things mortal are seen in relation to what is immortal.

This belongs to ancient wisdom and truth albeit in a number of registers. “There is no permanence,” the hero Gilgamesh is told on his quest for understanding in one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded by the German poet Rilke, shortly after its being discovered five thousand years later in the 19th century, as the great Epic of the Fear of Death; mortality, in other words. But there is a wonderful paradox. Gilgamesh is told this by Utnapishtim, a mortal who has been granted immortality (along with his wife) after the great flood by the arbitrary and capricious gods of ancient Sumeria. Utnapishtim is the precursor to Noah and the flood. But what kind of immortality are they granted? Not one in company or communion with others or even the gods but just the two of them in the Land of Dilmun, an imaginary place beyond the imaginary ends of the world. A kind of no place.

Shakespeare’s sonnet connects to the readings that belong to the great Feast of All Saints and its Octave. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day and today is both The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity and The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, better known as All Souls’ Day (transferred to Monday). In the season of scattered leaves, themselves an apt image of the dying of nature’s year, and in the culture of scattered souls, another apt image of things passing and falling away, there is a gathering into something more. This is shown in the readings that belong to All Saints’.

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