“Blessed and Beloved”
November 2012
Solemnity of All Saints (Year A; transferred from Nov. 1)
& Commemoration of All Souls
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Church’s calendar has two
Triduum—or three day—liturgies, one in the spring and one in the fall. The one in the Spring is the greatest feast
of the Church, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Easter itself. The fall Triduum—the celebration of All
Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day—is much smaller, but seeks to
take the promise of the Easter Feast and make it personal to us all, in our
shared humanity and shared mortality.
All Hallows’ Eve is
celebrated by the larger community as Halloween. Its basic message is that though there are
many things in the world and in our hearts and imaginations that are truly
frightening, we need not fear because God is with us. All
Saints’ celebrates the blessed departed whose lives and witness to the faith
were such that we look to them as examples, believe that they are in the
presence of God, and hope they are praying for us. All
Souls’ or the Commemoration of the
Faithful Departed remembers the larger group of the beloved dead for whom we hope and pray. As our Prayer Book puts it, “Remember all who died in the peace of
Christ, and those whose faith is known to
you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p.
375).
We
pray for the dead because it is a natural desire of the human heart, and since
ultimately death is such a mystery to us. Some early Protestants rejected prayers for
the dead because they were critical of a corrupt Church’s selling of prayers
and sacraments and believed that the dead instantly go to glory or damnation,
and that there is little prayer can do to change that. But the fact is, there are plenty of examples
of prayers offered for the dead in the traditional Greek canon of the Christian
Bible, as well as Jewish prayers for the dead.
So we pray for the dead, and hope.
Since it is impossible to know what
is inside the human heart, in practice many on All Souls’ remember and pray for all the dead, confident that God wants to save all his creatures,
and hopeful that, in the end, God’s love will overcome all our human crankiness
and resistance. Perhaps, just perhaps,
all the departed will one day be faithful
departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s,
not ours.
Blessed and beloved: All Saints and
All Souls. But also all of us here: Blessed and Beloved.
We have had a lot of funerals here
at Trinity in the last few weeks. Death
of those we know and love is hard, even when they spell the end of suffering
and pain. Part is the pain of missing
the beloved departed. Part is the pain
of being reminded that each and every one of us will die. Life is terminal; no one gets out alive. The grim reaper is a specter for most of us
because in moments of honest clarity we realize this: despite all our hopes,
our doctrines, and our stories of resurrection and rebirth, the only thing we
really commonly and publicly know about death is its finality: when you’re dead, you’re dead, never to come
back in any day-to-day sense of the word.
Conscious beings that we are, we fear
oblivion . And death, as mysterious as
it looks, certainly has the semblance of oblivion. And so we think of it as sleep, even deep
sleep, with some kind of dreaming or awakening.
As Shakespeare in Hamlet says,
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. …But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Some people say that the problem of
evil—the darkness, atrocity, and horror in life, summed up in sickness and
death, the fact that life is terminal—is the reason they cannot believe in the
existence of God. I think, however,
that the very fact that evil horrifies us is a sign that there’s something or someone more out there than just what we see
before us. The very fact we cannot conceive of oblivion,
not really, is a hint that our consciousness goes beyond our brain
functions. Though dread of horror and
fear of death may make us doubt at times the proposition “there is a God,” such
feelings actually trigger in us yearning and desire, the basis of giving our
heart to, of “beloving” God.
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil tells the story of two prisoners in
solitary confinement whose cells are next to each other. A stone wall separates them and they never
have seen the other. But over years,
they discover each other’s existence and learn to communicate using taps and
scratches. The very wall that separates them is their sole means of communicating.
“It is the same with us and God,” she says. “Every separation is a link.”
Nietszche, that iconic example of
godless honesty and will to power and create sense in the meaningless, says
that if you stare into the Abyss long enough, the Abyss stares back. Poet Christian Wiman takes this image further
and turns it inside out. For him, the
“Bright Abyss” is God, whom we desperately desire because he is absent, and yet
is constantly behind and within that desire.
Horror, sickness, and death are not good,
and not what God intends finally for any of us. That is why they all find themselves
redeemed in God’s economy. The
Beatitudes of Jesus we read today all find blessedness in some kind of horror:
hunger, poverty, broken hearts. The
Absent God is present in his apparent distance. And it is in the small hints of grace that
we find faith in the underlying goodness and love, and hope in the final saving
act: an affirmed heart after prayer, a
glimpse of glory in the Holy Meal shared by brothers and sisters, the luminous
beauty of service and the love we share, the example of the saints and the
martyrs. There is another beatitude in
scripture: blessed are those who die in
God.
One of the glories of our faith is that
we worship a God who became a human being in all respects, suffered the worst
that life can give, even unjust torment and death, and then came back
again. Death did not have the final
word. Randomness and Meaninglessness
lost the wager. That God invites us to
follow, to embrace the way of service and love, and even of embracing the
suffering of our lives, and redeeming it.
“Take up your cross, and follow me,” he says. He invites us all to be his witnesses, his
martyrs, his saints. As the prayer book
again puts it, may we, in walking the way of the cross, find it none other than
the way of life and life.
As part
of our prayers this week, I invite us to think about a dearly departed person,
whether one of the great saints of the Church, or a dear friend or family
member. Pray for them, and ask to be
prayed for by them. Think of what they
prayed for when they were here. Wonder what
they might be praying for now. If they
weren’t churchy, and it is hard to imagine them praying, ask what their hopes
and fears were, and what their hearts yearned for, especially when they were at
their best. For yearning is prayer. And then find a way to start working for
that.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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