Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day in all its splendor. We say aloud the names of those who no longer walk this earth but who are still very much alive in our hearts, our memories, and, most of all, in the life of God. We pray for the saints in heaven and on earth.
This kind of remembering is an important part of our faith. Not just because gratitude bubbles up within us as we remember, but because memories of the saints stir our imagination. As we call to mind the ways we have experienced Christ in the lives of those around us, our thoughts turn to Christ in our own lives. How is Christ made incarnate today in and through us? In what we do and say and love and desire? In the things for which we work and strive and hope? This is where imagination comes in…
We don’t remember the saints in order to become carbon copies of one saint or another. The saints give us examples of how Christ is made real in the world in the lives of his followers, but no two saints have ever lived the gospel in quite the same way. This multiplicity of Christ-shaped lives demands that each one of us work out our own sainthood, that we work out our own salvation (in the words of Paul) with fear and trembling.
In a world that thrives on competition and comparison, what a fresh wind it is that encourages us to look at our life in all its uniqueness and finitude, and then to imagine how Christ might be made real today in and through us. See, All Saints’ Day isn’t just about looking back, and it’s not just about some day in the future when all will gather in the New Jerusalem. All Saints’ Day is about creating the present, fashioning the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.
So as we bask in the celebration of all the saints, let the memories ignite our imagination and encourage us in our own journeys of faith. Let them confront us with this ever-present question: What might it look like to live the gospel in my life?
A poem by Michael Coffey…
The Dead
The dead do not walk and ravage flesh and trample
do not haunt us into mimicking their traditions
and repeating their creeds until our numb tongues
stop tasting spice and heat and sour and now
The dead do not sit impatient judging us from next Thursday
or from some ill-calculated millennial crashing horizon
wondering if we will ever figure it out and solve the puzzle
as well as they did in their spurt of energized entropy on earth
The dead sing to us their layered madrigals of mettle
that we will listen to their small triumphs of concrete love
and sympathize with their incarnate suffering without verdict
welcoming what shards of their wisdom survived modernity
These holy ones draw us into the future with silk string tugs
urging us to feel the gentle pull even now in this still and stuck day
swamping our hearts with this one mystery that floods us all
the finite bears the infinite, even their and our wrecked finitudes
So on this point the Bible is surely wrong about the future
that there will be no more tears in the holy city
their eyes water the river of life with joy overflowing
as they sit with us already sipping wine on the downtown shore
–http://www.ocotillopub.org/search/label/All%20Saints
An Honest Hope 