“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.
“They desire a better country.” It is the motto for the Order of Canada and reminds us of a fundamental feature of our humanity (even in our so-called post-Christian nation). The deeper spiritual point is that we seek something more and better, not just for ourselves but for one another. It is not just about ‘improving the world,’ a rather abstract and presumptuous desire. It is more about acknowledging our own incompleteness. For as Hebrews says, that “better country they desire” is “an heavenly” one. It is not the global world of the transnational elites.
We pray in the Lord’s prayer that God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are reminded of the divine mercy which alone perfects all the imperfect forms of human justice which so often turn into the spectacles of radical injustice; in short, hell on earth. Remembrance Day is a necessary reminder of our broken and wounded humanity, a sombre reflection on evil and death. To remember such dark and difficult things recalls us to mercy and grace. Our remembering is itself mercy and grace. As another All Saints’ tide Gospel reading reminds us (Mt. 25.31ff), our remembering compels the commitment to care for one another in the works of corporal mercy.
Paul, in Ephesians, uses the imagery of the accoutrements of war to emphasize the spiritual struggle for the good in our lives. “Put on the whole armour of God,” he says, naming the traditional elements of battle: breast-plate, helmet, and sword, now invested with a spiritual meaning. We are to put on “the breast-plate of righteousness,” “the helmet of salvation,” and “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” but, “above all, taking the shield of faith;” words heard a few Sundays ago (Trinity 21).
The image of the shield is particularly striking and belongs to a long tradition of reflection upon the paradoxes of the human condition about misery and felicity. Homer’s Iliad presents a detailed description of Achilles’ shield as part of the armour created for him by Hephaestus as Achilles prepares to return to the battle to avenge the death of his friend, Patroclus.
The shield depicts two cities: the city at peace and the city at war. The city of peace is imaged by a wedding festivaland by a court of law reconciling a conflict. Virgil reworks the same contrast between war and peace in his depiction of the shield of Aeneas in The Aeneid. In modern times, the poet W.H. Auden reworks the same image in his poem, The Shield of Achilles (1952).
Auden’s poem speaks to the dark and troubling realities of our world soaked in blood and hatred. He has in mind the horrors of the Second World War. He depicts Thetis, the mother of Achilles, as looking over the shoulder of the techno-god Hephaestus while he makes the shield. But looking for what? As Auden brilliantly imagines, she is looking “Forvines and olive trees,/Marble well-governed cities”; “For ritual pieties,/White flower-garlanded heifers, libation and sacrifice”; “For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance/ Moving their sweet limbs”; all images of a city at peace and in harmony, a community of joy and human flourishing; images of Paradise and Arcadia.
But instead of such images of peace and life, what she sees is “an artificial wilderness”, one of our making, “And a sky like lead,” a barren and empty world with “no blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,/Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down.” It is a meaningless world of armies “column by column in a cloud of dust/… march[ing away] enduring a belief/Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief”; a world of “barbed wire”, “bored officials” and “sweating sentries” where “a crowd of ordinary decent folk/ Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke”, silent in their despair or indifference, “as three pale figures were led forth and bound/To three posts driven upright in the ground.” Calvary imagined by way of the Holocaust. Nothing could be more graphic or more disturbing. We don’t want to hear it. Auden here, I think, outdoes Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922); Eliot was writing after the 1st World War, Auden after the 2nd.
It is a dead world where men died “before their bodies died,” a world of the spiritually dead, a world where there is “no dancing-floor/ But a weed-choked field” and where “a ragged urchin, aimless and alone … who’d never heard/Of any world where promises were kept,/Or one could weep because another wept”; in short, a world bereft of any compassion. It is a telling indictment of our modern times, a strong reminder of the evil of war and its destructive consequences. I find these images quite moving. Poetry is prophetic in the sense of providing an insight into what is.
Yet to ponder such things is to look for what transcends them without negating them, to what is greater than all the disorders of our hearts and our world. At the heart of the matter is knowing that we contend “against spiritual principles of darkness” within ourselves. It takes strong armour “to withstand in the evil day and, having done all, to stand.” It is really about the ethical teaching that bids us transcend the animosities of our hearts and world by recalling us to a deeper understanding of the dignity and truth of our humanity immanent in community. This is what C.S. Lewis called the Tau, the ethical way of life for our humanity in a remarkable set of lectures delivered during the dark days of the Second World War in 1943 and published as The Abolition of Man.
On the Octave of All Saints’ Day we are reminded of Jerusalem, the heavenly city to which we desire and to which we belong, a desire which informs and shapes our lives and our actions in the world and in the places in which we find ourselves, in our communities and our churches. But only if we recall our heavenly citizenship as grounded in our fellowship with God. The great message of All Saints’ tide is about the spiritual communion of All Saints’, the community of redeemed humanity that embraces and redeems all that belongs to our common humanity including our mortality.
“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”
Fr. David Curry
Octave of All Saints’ Day
November 8th, 2026