A World Bright with Joyous Saints (Midweek Message)

A World Bright with Joyous Saints

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

October 31, 2018

This evening marks the start of the Christian Northern Hemisphere autumn Triduum (three day festival): All Hallows’ Eve (Oct. 31), All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2).  It mirrors the Spring Triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday).  Where spring reminds us of life and new beginnings, the fall reminds of death and the endings that must precede new things.  All Hallows’ Eve commemorates our hope and confidence in Christ in the face of all that frightens us (“From ghosties and ghoulies and long leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us.”)  All Saints’ remembers the faithful departed whose examples and faith encourage us to follow them and ask for their prayers. All Souls’ remembers all the departed, beloved to us, for whom we pray. 

Much of our parish leadership will be in Seaside at Convention starting tomorrow, and be there for both All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days.  But we will have returned by Sunday, when we as a parish will celebrate All Saints’ Sunday, including our annual reading of the list of our beloved departed, and, at 5 p.m., a contemplative Eucharist in the Church.  In the Parish Hall at 5 p.m., Ashland Youth Collective will be building an ofrenda, a Dia de Muertos memorial altar honoring those whom we love but see no longer, under the guidance of a parishioner originally from Mexico City.    

Our commemorations of the departed, both the Saints and all the rest, remind us that we all—living, dead, and yet-to-come—are in this together, beloved creatures of our loving God.   We remember the examples of the saints and hope that they pray for us; we mourn the loss of the beloved ones we no longer see, and we pray for them.   

A favorite children’s hymn for the Fall Triduum reminds us that we all are saints in the sense of being made holy by Jesus in our baptism, and that the distinction between saints and sinners is thin indeed.   Saints fail like all other sinners.  They just keep picking themselves up and try again, and again:

  

“I sing a song of the saints of God,
Patient and brave and true,
Who toiled and fought and lived and died
For the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
And one was a shepherdess on the green;
They were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

“They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
And his love made them strong;
And they followed the right for Jesus' sake
The whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
And one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
And there's not any reason, no, not the least,
Why I shouldn't be one too.

“They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus' will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;
For the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one too.”

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+