The Traumatic Stress Bible (Proper 28C)

 

Ottheinrich, The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse 

 

The Traumatic Stress Bible

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28 Year C RCL)
13 November 2022—8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)

Malachi 4:1-2a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D., homilist

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

You’ve seen them, I think: sober-looking men in button down shirts and ties, accompanied by a few “modestly” dressed women with big hair, marching in our Rogue Valley parades on such days as the 4^th of July.   These “Christians” carry banners with the slogans: “Repent, for the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord is coming to burn the wicked!”  There banners quote today’s reading from Malachi about the Great Day of the Lord, hot as an oven but give no mention of its hope that the day of setting things right will dawn like the sun upon those who revere God and give alms to others (that’s what “righteousness” in that passage means.)  These people call themselves Evangelicals, or people of the Good News.  But with their grim focus, they would be better called Dysangelicals, people of the bad news. 

 

Whenever anything horrible happens, no matter what, count on it that someone somewhere will mark it up as an act of God, as some punishment for some bad thing, the fault of some bad group of other people.  You know what I’m talking about.  

 

Pat Robertson said the 2010 Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment on Haitians’ ‘historic pact with the Devil’, dredging up a bit of Haitian revolutionary war propaganda from two centuries ago.   In 2001, Jerry Falwell blamed the 9-11 attacks also on the victims, saying that God was punishing America for lax sexual morality and casual acceptance of abortion.  The severity of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was also in some quarters attributed to a Deity angry with America’s supposed moral laxness, rather than on climate change.  My friend Louis Crew-Clay, founder of the GBLT-supporting Episcopal ministry group Integrity, used to say that he personally over the years had been blamed for earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires, all supposedly God’s punishments for Louie’s depravities.  “Oh, honey, if only I had such power!” he would wistfully muse in his best Queen Lutibelle voice.  But it seems that explaining such disasters as punishment sent from an angry God rather than random horrors is easier for many people.  

 

Such Bad-News Bears usually quote parts of the Bible like Daniel or the Revelation of John to explain bad stuff as God’s punishment for the wicked.  But they misread these books entirely.   

 

Daniel, Revelation, and today’s Gospel lesson are examples of what scholars call apocalyptic writings.    The Greek word apokalypsis means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden.   The question is: what do they uncover?  Is it coming events, or is it God’s ultimate purpose? 

 

This literature is rich is images: symbolic figures, numbers, angels, and animals.  It includes disturbing and shocking scenes: a third of the sea or the moon turning to blood here, the stars falling from heaven and killing most living things there, a scarlet-clad crowned prostitute corrupting all nations here, a multi-headed beast covered with eyes and horns devouring the righteous there.  Though Christians for the first 1000 years understood this all symbolically and allegorically, more recently we often see people who say they believe it all literally: they see these stories as if they are predictions of coming events.  In the year 1,000, penitentes were running all over Europe whipping themselves and declaring the end of the world quoting such images.  Early Protestants saw the Bishop of Rome as having the “Mark of the Beast.”  In the American Civil War, the battles where so many millions died were seen as the Lord “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”  In the 1970s, we had “the Late Great Planet Earth”; today we have the Left Behind novels and claims that this or that public figure is the Anti-Christ. 

 

But Jesus, in today’s Gospel, won’t have anything to do with such thinking. 

 

Just before his arrest, Jesus is with his disciples at the Temple in Jerusalem.  It is pretty impressive: 10 stories high, with masonry stones embellished with smaller carved jewels glittering in the sun, gold leaf covering large parts of it, truly a marvel.  A disciple says, “Wow! Look at that, Jesus! Isn’t that impressive?”   Jesus replies by dismissing it all and saying, “Don’t get too excited.  The Temple is not really where God’s action is.  Soon not one stone there will be left standing on another.  It’s all going down.”   Later, they ask him about this.  Such destruction must be something on the scale of those troubling apocalyptic books.  So they ask him how his prediction fits into the images and timetables of the Book of Daniel and Ezekiel: when will this destruction happen, when is the end of the world? What will be the signs preceding it?

 

Jesus explains that such a scorecard approach to end-time signs is pointless—too many people abuse such imagery for their own advantage (“many will come and say…”).  He says they shouldn’t be too alarmed or overly excited by the appearance of apocalyptic stage props of “wars and rumors of wars” or natural catastrophes.  Such things, he says in Mark, are “but the beginning of the birthpangs,” that is, Braxton-Hicks’ contractions or false labor. Jesus is saying, “Don’t worry too much about any of these things.  They’re just a false alarm.  Keep calm and carry on!”   Jesus denies that apocalyptic should be read as a coded playbook of good guys versus bad guys, but rather as an invitation to hope despite whatever horrors we may run into.   

 

The fact is, Apocalyptic is primarily about events and people in the world of its authors, not the distant future.  The Revelation of John, the classic Christian Apocalypse, itself says that it is about things that will “come to pass soon”  (Rev 1:1).   That doesn't mean soon to us, but soon to the writer. 

Apocalyptic is literature written during persecution.  It seeks to understand the sufferings of the righteous and encourage them to not lose faith, and to keep resisting the oppressors.  In John’s Revelation, these are Romans under the Emperors Nero and Domitian, who put Christians in the arena to be torn apart by wild animals because they decline to offer incense to a statue of the Emperor.  In the Book of Daniel, they are Greek Syrians under Antiochus who tortured to death whole families simply because they kept the Law of Moses. 

 

Apocalyptic puts its message in rich images and code so that the readers can read it without the censors and secret police of the persecutors catching on and then using the possession of this literature as evidence against them. 

 

These books read sometimes as if some mental patient wrote them.  That is because the authors were traumatized people.  Whatever the specifics of the hardships they describe, we must remember that these books are about hope and perseverance, and the ultimate triumph of the Good.  People like our Dysangelical friends who take these books as coming events and cause for threat and alarm just don’t get it.  Instead of “Keep calm and carry on,” they, like Chicken Little, run about and shriek “the sky is falling! The sky is falling.” 

 

Jesus’ “false alarm!” approach here suggests what is the real message of Apocalyptic:  as Winston Churchill famously said in WWII, “If you are going through hell, then keep on going!” 

 

Jesus here is saying that we should take the traumatic events we experience, whether persecution, war, or natural disasters, as occasions for drawing closer to others, for helping them, for being helped by them, not as whips wielded by a nasty hateful deity. 

 

In the coming week, I invite us to ask how we react to bad things in life.  Do we blame God for them, or say God is punishing someone, maybe us?  In prayer, let us seek ways to help use the traumas we experience or witness as ways to draw closer to others.  Let us encourage each other in hope unwavering and thus bring closer the great day when God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done on earth as in heaven.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

Walk in Beauty, Softly (Paw Prints Article)

 

 

Walk in Beauty, Softly

Fr. Tony’s Paw Prints Message

November 11, 2022

 

 “Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!  You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.  If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.   Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them.  If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”  Matt 6:22-34, The Message

 

This passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is about seeing things and behaving in ways congruent with faith in a loving God.  The basic idea—that putting first things first frees us from worry and behaviors that are self-defeating and harmful to others—is found in most of the world’s spiritualities and religions.  It can be as simple as the back packer’s dicta, “take it in, pack it out” and “leave the site better than you found it” or as broad as “tread the earth lightly” in modern ecological thought. 

 

In traditional Chinese thought, it means following the Tao, or order of nature.  In the Dine or Navajo tradition, it is expressed in the exquisite closing prayer of the Walking the Way of Blessing Ceremony.  It is usually translated in this way, where “beauty” means the harmony and balance found in the natural world:

 

“In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again.”

 

 Anglican poet Christina Rosetti talked about treading softly and seeing things with right eyes in the following poem, which takes themes of All Saints and All Souls and applies them to all creation: 

 

“Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground.

         It may be, could we look with seeing eyes,

         This spot we stand on is Paradise

Where dead have come to life and lost been found,

Where Faith has triumphed, Martyrdom been crowned,

         Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise;

         From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,

And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.

O earth, earth, earth, hear thou thy Maker’s Word:

“Thy dead shalt thou give up, nor hide the slain”—

Some who went weeping forth shall come again

         Rejoicing from the east or from the west,

As doves fly to their windows, love’s own bird

         Contented and desirous to the nest.” 

 

Treading lightly upon earth and walking in beauty demand that we look carefully at the world about us and see God’s hand at work.  They come from a heart moved by gratitude and awe.   Thanks be to God. 

 

Fr. Tony+

 

Jesus' Focus on the Family (Proper 27C)

 

 

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year C RCL)
6 November 2022—8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

In the culture wars over sexuality and marriage, some people often say that they support the “Biblical view of marriage.”  When I hear that, I often wonder what Bible they have been reading, since so many different forms of marriage are discussed and endorsed in different parts of the Bible: a nuclear family and couple of a man and a woman (Gen. 2:24), polygamy with one man and several wives or broader polygyny including concubines and slaves, whether your own or your wives’ (Genesis; Judges; 1-2 Kings), levirate marriage to produce offspring for a dead brother (Gen. 36:6-10), forced marriage between a rapist and his victim (Deut. 22:28-29), and even simply the act of forcible rape of women in war as “spoils of war” (Numbers 31:1-18; Deut. 21:11-14).     All of these marriage forms discussed and endorsed in parts of the Bible are based on the idea of the woman as the chattel possession of the man.

 

Now I admit that idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of “Little House on the Prairies,” “Father Knows Best,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” ministry attracts millions of people struggling for happier, better lives by seeking direction from what Dobson claims to be the teachings of the Bible. 

 

But the Bible even at its best is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You only have to read it to realize how messy and twisted families can be.   If you idealize the patriarchal family, just look at the horror stories in the families of the patriarchs themselves: hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear. 

 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading.  But it is key in seeing what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

 

Opponents approach Jesus: Sadducees, conservatives who accept only the Torah as scripture and are wary of later prophetic and wisdom writings and their new-fangled ideas like life after death.  

 

In order to make a point for their conservative denial of life after death, they pose a hypothetical question of property:  seven brothers die in sequence, each marrying the deceased brother’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is a resurrection from the dead, to whom does that woman belong?”   For them, wives and children have the status of property. Women can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Since this woman clearly can’t belong to all seven, the resurrection is an impossibility, rather like a dirty joke. 

 

Jesus replies: “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. All belong to God alone.” 

 

The three great branches of Judaism at this time had completely different takes on the messiness of life and prospects for life after death. 

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah and the Community’s ascetic rule of life would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

 

The Sadducees of today’s reading believed that the Law controlled life’s messiness, but rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying. 

 

The Pharisees too believed that the Law brought order to life’s messiness, but rejected the asceticism of the Essenes and the reluctance of the Sadducees to accept immortality and resurrection.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

 

Jesus, close to the Pharisees here, affirms both this world and the world to come.   “Being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is not an expression of ascetic contempt for the body and marriage.  Remember that story about Jesus turning water into wine at that wedding in Cana.  In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned” marriage as a “manner of life.”   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine, beer, and good food. 

 

You see, Jesus accepted—indeed, reveled in!—life  in all its messiness, but didn’t lose hope for something better.   

 

Part of the problem is we idealize things and pretend the messy parts don’t exist—another way of not affirming this present life.  In the hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  Elena and me and our four children in group poses over the years, our parents, siblings, our children’s cousins, our grandchildren.    On occasion guests comment “What a lovely family!”  I smile politely in return.  That collection of pictures is carefully curated!  Thankful as we are for our family and all the happy memories, we realize the photographs tell only part of a complicated story.   We don’t hang some pictures because they are just too painful: those taken at funerals or during episodes of mental illness of some family member, when a loved one was in prison, during estranged feelings, or after suicides, divorces, tragic accidents and grim degenerative illnesses.   But all this is part of real life.  And accepting and loving life means bearing this brokenness with grace as well.

For Jesus, God’s love is revealed in the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, the age to come, fully in accord with God’s will.  Here, we make exploitative contracts and unfair subordinating relationships, including marriage.  Men take wives as chattel.  But in the age to come, there will be a radical equality:  no exploitation, privilege, or abuse.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person equally to God: “[They] neither marry nor are given in marriage... because they are like angels and are children of God.” 

 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father”:  this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage. 

 

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  This is not a prohibition of calling a priest “father” or “mother.”  It is not about titles.  It is about real-life fathers. For Jesus families aren’t absolute, and even good fathers are defective when contrasted with the True Father.  

 

In Mark 3, Jesus’ Mother and brothers think Jesus has gone mad, and ask him to abandon his mission and return home.  His reply is biting:  “Who are my mother and my brothers?  Not you, but those who follow God along with me—they are my true family!”  In all of this, Jesus suggests that our earthly relationships—no matter how good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true relationships God created us for. 

 

Some people today, triggered by experience of abusive patriarchy, object to Jesus’ way of referring to God: “father,” abba, or “Papa.”  Jesus clearly is not saying God is a biological male or our parent in any literal sense.  Elsewhere, Jesus uses feminine images for God: a nursing mother, a brooding hen.  All the same, he tells us to pray, “Our father.” 

 

I find it curious that the people who are most quick to urge us to always use peoples’ preferred names, titles, and pronouns at times seem to be the most resistant to using the designation for God that Jesus gives us:  Father.  Granted, its use may be merely an artifact of the patriarchal culture in which the Bible was written.  And granted, its use can be a trigger for some.  But Jesus uses the image again and again, even as he deconstructs oppression, patriarchy, and toxic hierarchy. 

 

Admittedly, expansive and inclusive language in our worship and our God-talk is necessary to break down patriarchy’s abusive oppression.  But we should not let our own triggers and justice agendas become obstacles to hearing what Jesus is teaching us here: that our relationship to God is like the relationship of a child to the best of all possible fathers: intimate, loving, and fully trusting.

 

Jesus’ response to the Sadducees is not that in the afterlife people are celibate or neutered, or that human relationships, including families, cease. His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better in the world to come.  Life will then fully embody what we were created for, and not be diminished and twisted by the brokenness we have come to see as normal. 

 

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in the God whom he called abba.  It’s not just what Jesus taught.  It is what his birth, life, death, and resurrection are all about.   Incarnation demands that we see that all human life is redeemable.   

 

 

 

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  Not the nasty bits, to be sure.  I suspect we will be very, very pleasantly surprised by what God actually has in store.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

 

The fact is, no family is “normal” or ideal.  We try our best to muddle along, and trust in God’s love and healing power.  On occasion in moments of mutual support and love, of cozy familiarity and even intimacy, we see glimpses of God’s ultimate good intentions for us.  And these glimpses are sweet indeed. 

 

Thanks be to God.

 

Positives, Negatives, and Gratitude (Paw Prints Article)

 

Positives, Negatives, and Gratitude

Fr. Tony’s Paw Prints Article

November 4, 2022

 

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

 

In recent weeks, I have seen too often hatred and condemnation in the faces of others, whether from the pious “religious” people taking issue with those of us they condemn as departing from God’s pure ways, or true belief and practice, or from people hurt by the religious and reacting in anger and contempt, or from partisan activists on either side of the left/right divide blaming those on the other side of the divide for all the ills they see in the world. 

 

Their barely contained anger and resentment contrasted with my memories of a former mentor and spiritual director of mine:  a Buddhist nun in a small temple in the mountains north of Taipei Taiwan.  She was joyous.  I can’t think of a time when I did not see her smiling.  She clearly said and expressed her beliefs and opinions, but there was never a whiff of anger or resentment in her.  All she did was done with joy, gratitude, and empathy for others, especially those who disagreed with her. 

 

We are called to be Jesus’ disciples.  That means following him, and emulating him.  He had his enemies, to be sure.  And he said that in following him, we would have enemies also.  But he taught clearly: love your enemies.  It is clear that on rare occasion Jesus got angry or impatient with those who used religion as a means of oppressing others, spelling out in no uncertain terms where he thought they had gone astray.  But when I think of Jesus, I think of him with that gentle smile of deep joy of my Buddhist master, not with the condemning grimace of partisan purity. 

 

We often think that following Jesus means conforming to outward rules or higher principles, following his “commandments” and keeping his “ways.”   But if this is mere outward conformity of actions or inward thought-policing, it misses the heart of the matter. 

 

Jesus invites us into metanoia, often translated as “repentance,” but better understood as “a change of the mind” or “a turning of the heart.”  Jesus invites us to close relationship with God, who in his mind was not a warring potentate or dour judge, but rather an intimate and loving parent.    Gratitude should be our default.  Gratitude drives out fear, alienation, and contempt.  It encourages empathy and forgiveness.  That is why he asks us to pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive the debts owed us.”  

 

The fruits of the spirit according to Galatians are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).   If we think we are being touched by the spirit or spoken to by God, but what we get is anger, resentment, fear, and contention, we are probably mistaken.  Joy and peace are what the spirit give, what God inspires in our hearts, not partisan posturing or manipulation of others so that they give us what we want in a constant struggle for dominance of submission. 

 

Perhaps as a check on ourselves and the lies we tell ourselves, we should ask ourselves, throughout the day, “Am I smiling?”  “Am I trying to understand this person so different from me?”  “Am I thankful?”  When angry, we should ask, “What is it about me that makes me react in this way? What fears and insecurities?”  and not “why can’t that creep over there just change?” 

 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

 

A Homily for All Souls' Day (2022)

 

A Homily for All Souls’ Day

For dear friends at the Rogue Valley Manor  

Nov. 2, 2022

Celebrating mass in black and gold vestments. 

 

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

And no torment will ever touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died,

And their departure was thought to be a disaster,

And their going from us to be their destruction;

But they are at peace. 

For though in the sight of others they were punished,

Their hope is in immortality.

(Wisdom 3:1-4)

All Souls

--May Sarton

 

Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited--
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.

 

Today is All Souls’ Day, the commemoration of all the faithful departed.  Where All Saints’ Day remembers those whom we as a community have come to acknowledge as models and examples in faith, whom we ask to pray for us, All Souls’ remembers all the rest of our siblings, brothers and sisters and all, whom we have lost to death, and for whom we pray. 

 

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.   C.S. Lewis wrote, “Of course, I pray for the dead.  The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him?” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).

 

Since it is so hard for us to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many of us approach All Souls’ as an occasion to 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.  In any case, as the Prayer Book says, there are many of the dead whose faith “is known alone to God.” 

 

Several years ago, after the All Hallows' Eve Liturgy at Trinity Ashland, my wife  Elena and I went home to a beautiful Halloween night sky with stars and bright puffy clouds scudding by, shining bright and backlit by the nearly full moon.  After all those assurances in the liturgy against ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, and all those prayers for a peaceful and restful night, Elena had a terrible nightmare that woke both of us up at 3 a.m.   When we were younger, I was the one with terrible nightmares, and she was the one who by comforting and cuddling, helped me back to sleep.  Now it was my turn to play the role of a great warm teddy bear helping her get back to sleep. 

 

When I am asked about All Saints’ and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, and the commemoration of All Souls’ and prayers for the dead, I think of the role of comforting one’s bedmate to help them sleep.  In night-time darkness when nightmares come, we are there for each other.  The blessed departed, who prayed in life and most certainly continue to pray in death, are there for us.   They are not just a “great cloud of witnesses” in the arena seating cheering us on.  They actively work on our behalf, and give us strength, if only by their examples.  The great multitude of the rest of the dead—well, we pray for them, and by our prayers, hopefully help work God’s mercy in them.   

 

We also are the hands and hearts of the blessed departed here below. 

 

All Souls’ is often experienced very much as a family feast, when we remember those closest to us who have gone on before. 

                             

In all the variety of world religions, there aredifferent ways of remembering the dead.   All have burial and mourning customs.  But further on, we have commemorative practices that keep our remembrance alive.  Jews light a Yahrzeit candle and recite the Kaddish; Roman Catholics offer requiem masses.  Mexicans make ofrendas with pictures of the departed, tissue paper cutouts of hope, and sugar skulls expressing the sweetness there is even in death, as well as the glorious marigold garlands and pathways encouraging the souls of our beloved to come back to us if only for a night.   The Chinese on a bright and clear day in the spring go to family tombs, sweep them and decorate them with flowers and offerings, and usually have a happy picnic there, in the company of their departed loved ones. 

 

The essence in all of these traditions is remembrance.  By thinking on our beloved dead, we reconnect with them, find joy in the good times shared, and note our own impermanence and the shortness of even a long life.  Remembering the dead is one of the ways we keep them in our hearts with us. 

 

I invite all of us today to take at least 10-15 minutes just to remember our family members and friends who have died: bring to your mind scenes that you recall, happy or painful.  Remember the details of those scenes:  the smells and sounds, the tastes, and how things felt. 

 

I promise you will find the practice worth the time: bringing to mind our loved ones is a way of processing grief, but also a way of reconnecting with joy and love. 

 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+