Sermon for the Octave of All Saints’ Day
“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”
Mercy is not only at the center of the Beatitudes; it underlies and shapes all the Beatitudes from beginning to end. The truth and dignity of our humanity is found in blessedness, especially the blessedness of suffering, as we explored last Sunday, paradoxically as that seems. Yet that is the more transcendent form of blessedness that belongs to the good of our humanity in the immediacy and immanence of the divine found in human experience but only as its corrective and its redemption. The unity of the communion of saints is ultimately grounded in the unity of God. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus says. Thus, the Beatitudes provide a way to think about the difficult things of suffering, like persecution and loss without being defined by them, and even to things like war and its atrocities. These are the things that Remembrance Day properly concerns and which should concern us. It is certainly not about the glorification of war.
Beginning in the mid-11th century in western Christianity, The Festival of All Saints was followed by The Solemnity of All Souls. The remembering of all the faithful departed and of human mortality is embraced within the Communion of Saints. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews tells us and speaks explicitly of those who suffered (Heb. 11. 32-37), even those “of whom the world was not worthy” (vs. 38) who are understood to be enrolled in that so “great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12, 1) which concludes the Epistle. It signifies the hope of “a sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). All Souls’ was part of the Cluniac Reform of the Benedictine order initiated by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (c. 962-1048). The thread of glory runs through the grave of our common mortality. It became, more or less, universally observed in the West by the 13th century and, perhaps, inspired such deeply reflective hymns like Dies Irae (1260) “Day of wrath, O day of mourning” on the theme of judgement and death sung in Advent and at requiems.
For our contemporary world, these ways of thinking have been associated with Remembrance Day, ever since November 11th, 1918, the end of the First World War. Remembrance Day is really a secular form of All Souls’ Day. We gather at cenotaphs, the empty tombs, in our communities where the names are written of those who left our communities, our churches, our schools, and went off to the ‘great wars’ that have had such a profound and devastating effect upon our contemporary world. They didn’t return. That is the point. Our Maritime communities are defined in no small measure by the immensity of their sacrifice, a sacrifice in the sense of commitment to what they thought was significant and worth dying for, to some extent or another, in all of the confused mixture of motives and intent that belonged to the forms of cultural and communal identities. It was not about the later abstractions of democracy and freedom. To read the names at the Windsor cenotaph is to be reminded of all the little places in Hants County from which they came and to realize in a moment how entire generations were wiped out; a legacy of loss that has affected those communities to this day.
