For All the Saints

This coming Sunday at the church I serve, we will name those who have passed from this life into the next this last year.  We will light a candle symbolizing the way each person let his/her light shine and warm our lives.  We will speak the name of the person and feel the fingerprints she/he left on our hearts.  Our church will be ablaze, memory, love, and certainly God's presence.  The writer of Hebrews says, "Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses."  We don't always see through the mist of our mundane lives the sacred infusion of the saints.  We don't always pay attention to the traces of God's grace in our daily lives.  We end up compartmentalizing spirituality from "the rest of our lives".  But the purpose of the church is to remind us and teach us that there is no separation between Sunday and Monday mornings.  There is no such thing as your spiritual life and daily life.  The two are intertwined and tangled.  The church's call, mission, and ministry is to be about helping us practice noticing and naming God's presence everywhere and inside everyone and so we can say with Richard Rohr, "everything belongs."  Or we could say with Paul, "Nothing can separate us from the love of God...not even that meeting we have coming up today!!"  But God help us try to get through.

A few years ago the words of Hebrews came to life when I visited St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco.  They have painted a mural of saints ~ but not only dead white guys ~ but all the saints whose wisdom and love and light can guide us with God's grace.  On the mural are people like Anne Frank, Bishop Tutu, Dr. King, Ella Fitzgerald, and Martin Luther.  To view the names of the saints, you can click here.  It is powerful to stand in the center of the circular room with the Saints dancing (they are dancing) above you.  It is the room where the church celebrates the Eucharist, communion, each Sunday and they dance before communion too!  Surrounded by saints, not only in church, but in our daily living...that is good news of God's love in these days.

I invite you to not only consider the wise and wonderful leaders of our world...who from their labors rest...but who remind us of courage and faithfulness in struggle ~~ but also consider those in your own life who left fingerprints.  For me, I remember Sue and Frank and Judie and Phil and my mom and many more on this All Saint's Day and leading up to this weekend. I give thanks, I grieve, and I stay open to God's grace not only in the past...but in this present moment.  For as an All Saint's Day Hymn declares,

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, on the street, in the store, 

in church, by the sea, in the house next door; 

they are saints of God, whether rich or poor, 

and I mean to be one too

(I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, verse 3)

Amen, Amen, Alleluia and Amen.

Grace and peace ~~