All Saints Day, November 1, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Francis Beckham, OHC

All Saints Day, November 1, 2025

• Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Psalm 149 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31

Click here for an audio of the sermon

“Now therefore arise, O Lord God, into thy resting place, thou, and the ark of thy strength: let thy priests, O Lord God, be clothed with salvation, and let thy saints rejoice in goodness.” Amen. (2 Chronicles 6:41)

Regardless of anything that happens during the next several minutes, I’m happy to be able to assure you with the highest level of confidence possible that we’ll all be going to bed tonight convinced that we heard an amazing sermon here on All Saints Day. And not only will we remember the sermon as being pretty great, but we’ll also recall with wonderment at just how eloquent and wise the preacher was. Yes, we’ll all agree it was one of those sermons that leaves an impression, makes us think. Indeed, today’s sermon has the power – the likelihood, even – to change not only our lives, but also the lives of those around us. 

The sermon is, of course, the one Jesus just preached to all of us in Saint Luke’s Gospel: The Sermon on the Plain. As it’s obviously a perfect sermon, it will not be improved upon by anything anyone – and especially I – could possibly have to say about it. Jesus has just told us that true joy and purpose are to be found by living in love for God and one another rather than for the false and fleeting honors of the present age. In short, Jesus says, if we want to be “blessed” – that is, if we want to be saints (which is the whole point after all!) – we must strive to do the right thing, not worrying about the inevitable inconveniences it causes or the nasty reactions it sometimes incites in certain people, and to treat everybody – especially those who mistreat us – as we would like to be treated ourselves. 

And that’s pretty much it! There’s nothing else to add to the message. The only thing for us to do is to take Jesus’ words to heart, believe and understand them, and decide how we’re going to put them into practice. As we know, of course, this is far easier said than done much of the time. But, as it happens to be All Saints Day, we have the benefit of learning from so many people who have gone before us – as well as many who are journeying to Heaven with us in the here and now – to discover what living into the Reign of God in everyday life, as Jesus has just invited us to do, actually looks like. 

First, of course, there are the great saints of history, including those from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Take Daniel for instance. The passage immediately preceding today’s first reading contains Daniel’s famous ordeal in the den of lions. He was made to endure this by people who were angry that he was continuing to pray to God rather than to the earthly king Darius. And, sure enough, Daniel suffered. But because he was faithful to who he was and how he knew God wanted him to live, Daniel was indeed “blessed” in spite of being mistreated, and, through his example, he even eventually helped the king and others see and acknowledge the greatness of God. 

But the saints don’t only live in Bible stories and hagiographical legends. I can think of many times when complete strangers have unknowingly preached the Gospel to me simply by doing to others as they would have others do to them, or to their loved ones. In many ways, these are my favorite examples of the saints at work because, if we pay attention, we can see them happening almost anywhere – little Gospel vignettes playing out in real life. 

I remember riding the bus home from work on a very rainy afternoon, and people were getting on wearing raincoats and carrying wet umbrellas. But one man got on who hadn’t been prepared for the deluge and he was soaked to the skin. As he sat down, I could imagine how uncomfortable he was pressed against the seat with his wet clothes, his waterlogged socks squishing inside his work shoes, and the air conditioning chilling him out. But I wasn’t the only one who noticed him. There was a woman sitting across the aisle and a row back who immediately began pulling paper towels from her bag and handing them across. Even though he still stayed pretty wet, he could at least dry his head, face, arms, and hands. The gratitude on his face and in his voice said it all: he was profoundly thankful to have been unexpectedly blessed by this kind and caring saint. 

Then, of course, there are the saints we know more personally – our relatives, friends, classmates, coworkers, baristas – whose saintliness can often be a bit disguised, but who nevertheless bring Jesus’ words to life for us. Here in the monastery, I’m often touched and, frankly, shocked, by the many acts of thoughtfulness shown to me by my brothers when they notice that I could use a little extra kindness or understanding in a given moment, such as offering to cover a work assignment because they know I’m not feeling well, or patiently rearranging part of their own schedule to help me cope with a project or task that’s gotten away from me – and all without grumbling (at least outwardly) or expecting anything in return. In such cases, I can see the spirit of Jesus’ instructions to “Give to everyone who begs from you” being put into action in a real and holy way, and both the brother and I are indeed made “blessed” by this. 

In the beginning, I promised we’d go to bed thinking about the sermon we heard from Jesus this morning. But why wait until tonight? I’d like to invite all of us to spend time today thinking about some of the saints who have preached the Sermon on the Plain to us through the examples of their lives. These could be the celebrity saints of history, as well as our grandparents or parents; siblings, cousins, and other family member; friends; classmates; co-workers; people on the bus, train, or street – anyone whose actions, words, or presence have helped us see the path to God a little more clearly. 

And while we’re at it, let’s also honor those times when we, as saints-in-training ourselves, have been the bearers of Christ to others. Yes, it’s almost certainly a fact that, somewhere out there, a stranger still remembers you because you once smiled at them on a bad day; or you pulled their suitcase off the baggage claim belt when others were crowding it and they couldn’t get through; or maybe you casually waved them into your lane on the freeway when they were rushing to the hospital, desperate to see someone they loved for the last time. You just never know. As we think of all these saints – those both known to us and unknown, alive and at rest – let’s join with Saint Paul in praying for them and never cease giving thanks for the ways God’s love has shone – and continues to shine – through their lives. And may peace and all goodness be upon each and every one of us, now and always. Amen.

All Saints' Day, November 1, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero

All Saints' Day, November 1, 2024

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

I was happy to see my name on the preaching rota for All Saints Day again because this time of year has become very special and meaningful for me. Cynthia Borgeault calls it the Fall Triduum: All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls. We know about the Triduum that forms the heart of the Holy Week celebration- Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the great Vigil of Easter. The external observances of these days help us to experience a solemn journey deep within our hearts.

Both Spring and Fall Triduums deal with the Paschal Mystery, the passage from death to life which is at the heart of all mystical paths. They do so, however, with a different emotional and spiritual character and experience. In the Spring the days are lengthening, resurrection energy is moving through the earth as it bursts with new life. In the Fall the movement is inward. The days are shortening, the leaves are dying and falling, and the earth draws into itself. The fall season confronts us with reminders of our own mortality.

Like the Spring Triduum, the Fall Triduum offers us a journey. It begins with All Hallows Eve. Unlike the consumerism and excess of Halloween, All Hallows Eve can be an occasion for facing our shadow self and becoming aware of the tricks our ego tries to play on us when it doesn’t get what it wants.

Having faced our shadow self, we then move to today’s feast of All Saints, the celebration of the Communion of Saints, that glorious band of those like stars appearing, of dazzling brightness, golden crowns wearing, as the offertory hymn we will sing so beautifully and poetically describes it. Communion is what they’re doing- communing- dissolving in gratitude at that great banquet, where there is no more tears, no more weeping, no more pain, but only rejoicing in the heart of God for eternity. It is the way the Church honors the deep interconnectedness of God’s family across time, culture, and history.

And during the whole Communion Rite, we are joined with the whole Communion of Saints, with angels and archangels, with cherubim and seraphim. We are joined with the church on earth and the church in heaven, now divided only by the narrow stream of death. The whole host of heaven crowds the very air we breathe, and all becomes the Kairos of intimacy. Imagine that! That’s what we are about to do in a few minutes. What if we all became truly aware of that reality today?!

Tomorrow we are invited to acknowledge grief in remembrance, gratitude, and hope, as we celebrate the loved ones who are no longer with us. It is a reminder of the finality of death that challenges us to be fully present here and now, and so begin eternal life, that overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. Yes, in the midst of life, we are in death.  But the Fall Triduum reminds us of a deeper truth: in the midst of death, we are promised life.

I have to admit that when I read the Gospel story assigned for today, my reaction was: “The story of the raising of Lazarus, what?? No! Why?” I think it is one of the strangest and most difficult stories to grasp in Scripture. I find it strange that Jesus takes his time when he first hears of Lazarus’ illness? I find it very strange that he tells his disciples that Lazarus is “asleep,” instead of saying he is dead. And the whole business of bringing Lazarus back to life… weird. Does a person who’s been dead for four days even want to come back? And we never hear about Lazarus again in the Gospel narrative. He virtually disappears after he comes out of the tomb. Talk about mysterious!

And yet, there was a phrase that touched my heart from the beginning and has continued to nag at me during my lectio. A phrase that isn’t strange or mysterious. A phrase I can understand because of its humanity; because of its incarnated nature: “Jesus began to weep.” Perhaps that’s the deepest meaning of this strange story, that grief takes hold of the Word of God incarnate and breaks him down. Jesus, who is the most accurate and fully human revelation of the divine we will ever have, stands at the grave of his friend and cries.

Why does he cry when he knew that Lazarus was about to come back to life?  Why does he cry after intentionally staying away from Bethany during Lazarus’s illness? The why does not matter to me because Jesus’ tears legitimize human grief and negate any form of Christianity that leaves no room for lament. Jesus’ tears honor the complexity of our sorrows and joys. Joy does not cancel out the essential work of grief.    

When I read that Jesus wept, I feel assured that it is okay for my faith to be nuanced. I am assured that it is okay for my expressions of belief and trust to come with emotional baggage. Martha, after all, expresses resentment and reproach at Jesus’s delay, and in the next breath voices her trust in his power. And Mary blames Jesus for Lazarus’ death, but she does so on her knees, in a posture of belief and humility. And Jesus’s face is full of tears when he prays to God and raises his friend from the dead. These are the expressions of faith of the human person fully alive; a faith that embraces the full spectrum of human psychology.

When I read that Jesus cried, I feel assured that it is okay to yearn for life. It is okay to feel a sense of wrongness and injustice in the face of death. It is okay to mourn the loss of vitality and longevity. It is okay to love and cherish the gift of life here and now.

Three years ago, I decided to create an “altar de muertos” in my cell. I have been doing so ever since, including this year. I believe it is a beautiful Mexican tradition. Now, I’m not Mexican. I’m from Puerto Rico, (which is a beautiful island on the Caribbean and not a “floating pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean,”) but I love this tradition which has its origins in pre-hispanic Aztec believes that with time were syncretized with Christian beliefs.

The tradition consists of creating an altar colorfully decorated that has photos of loved ones who have died and where one presents to them offerings of food, flowers, candles and other things. Now, I already have a prayer altar in my cell. As a visual and creative type with, perhaps, some flair for the theatrical, I’ve always benefited from creating a dramatic space with images and objects that inspire and ground my prayer. No, I’m not offering food to the dead since I don’t share those beliefs. All the food and flowers on my altar are artificial. But my “altar de muertos” is something tangible that helps me remember, celebrate, honor and mourn those significant souls who were part of my life and I will never see again in the flesh. Every year, as I get older, more and more people join my “altar de muertos,” reminding me of my own mortality.                         

This year I had the very emotional experience of adding my younger blood brother’s photo to the altar. I didn’t cry when he died in August. I was relieved. My brother had given up on life some years ago and was very unhappy, self-destructing and consumed by alcohol. While the news is always shocking, even when one knows it will come at some point, I saw it as a mercy. I was also trying to hold it together so I could be present for my elderly and frail mother who was inconsolable. But adding his photo to my “altar de muertos” felt so very wrong and devastating. My younger brother was not supposed to die before me. So, I cried, and it was okay, because Jesus cried.

In the Gospel story, it is because Jesus experiences the devastation of death that he recognizes the immediate need to restore life. Can Jesus’ tears provoke us in the same way? What breaks your heart right now? I’m personally heartbroken about what is happening in Ukraine, and Gaza, and Israel. I am heartbroken about the political landscape of this country, which makes it almost unrecognizable from the land I’ve lived in and so loved since I was sixteen years old. I experience this sorrow even as I live in absolute faith and hope that God’s hand is still at work in the world because through his tears, Jesus calls us into the holy vocation of empathy. Sorrow is a powerful catalyst for change, and shared lament can lead to transformation. 

As we take time today and tomorrow to remember, to mourn, and to celebrate those who have gone on before us, may Jesus’s tears be our guide. May his honest expression of sorrow give us the permission and impulse, not only to do the work of grief and healing, but to move with compassion into a world that so much needs our empathy and love right now. May we remember that our journey is not to the grave, but through it. May we remember that the Lord who weeps is also the Lord who resurrects. And may we mourn always in hope. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

 

 

 

 

All Saints C - November 1, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

All Saints C - November 1, 2022

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Br. Josép's altar for the Dia de Los Muertos.

For the past four weeks, since I came back from vacation, I’ve had this nagging longing during my alone prayer time early in the morning in my cell. The longing has been for creating an altar for el Dia de los Muertos to remember the very significant saints in my life who have died. Now, I already have a prayer altar in my cell. As one of them visual and creative types, I’ve always benefited from creating a dramatic space with images and objects that inspire and ground my prayer. (It’s no accident I was in theatre for so many years.) This year I needed to have something tangible to help me celebrate these three wonderful Fall days of which today is the centerpiece. So, I turned my prayer altar into an Altar del Dia de los Muertos.

This longing to celebrate these three days in a tangible way has a bit of a history for me that goes back to my formation as a monk. When I was a novice, I became good friends with Sister Martha, who was then in the novitiate of the Cabrini Sisters down the road from us. She would come to visit from time to time and we would sit down and have long conversations about our vocation and what had brought us to religious life. One day, I asked Sister Martha what she longed for in her vocation. Without hesitating and very confidently, she said: “¡Yo quiero ser santa!” I remember feeling a bit uncomfortable by her response, as if perhaps she was wanting to be “holier than thou” or something. She told me stories of the people in her life whose own lives had influenced her in her decision to become a religious. She referred to these people as “santos”. 

Also during my novitiate, we were given an article to read written by Cynthia Borgeault. She writes about how the Fall offers us a Triduum in All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Day. Now, we know about the Triduum, which means “three days”, that forms the heart of the Holy Week celebration- Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the great Vigil of Easter. The external observances of these days help us to experience a solemn journey deep within our own hearts.

Both Spring and Fall Triduums deal, in different ways, with the Paschal Mystery, that passage from death to life which is at the heart of all mystical paths. They do so, however, with a different emotional and spiritual character and experience. In the Spring the days are lengthening, resurrection energy is moving through the earth as it bursts with new life. In the Fall the movement is inward. The days are shortening, the leaves are dying and falling, and the earth draws into itself. The fall season confronts us with reminders of our own mortality. 

Like the Spring Triduum, the Fall Triduum offers us a journey. It begins with All Hallows Eve. If we look beyond the shallow revelry and excess of the popular holiday Halloween, we can see it as the symbol of facing our shadow self and the tricks our ego will play, if we let it, when it doesn’t get what it wants. Having faced and confronted the shadow self,  we then move to today’s feast of All Saints, the glorious celebration of what we call the Communion of Saints. Communion not only because Holy Communion is usually what we are doing when we remember them, but also because we believe that’s what they’re doing- communing- dissolving in gratitude at that great banquet, where there is no more tears, no more weeping, no more pain, but only rejoicing in the heart of God for eternity.

And the table around which we are about to gather is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet around which the saints are already gathered. It is the table around which we are tied to the whole Communion of Saints, united with all who have ever received bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. We are joined with angels and archangels, with cherubim and seraphim. We are joined with the church on earth and the church in heaven and all who have called on the name of God. The whole host of heaven crowds the very air we breathe, and all becomes the Kairos of intimacy.

All Saints Day is also one of the days set aside by the Church as especially appropriate for new Baptisms. In other words, a day when new saints, as the church has long referred to them, are made. They are God’s anointed, the exact same words the Gospels use for Jesus, joined with him in baptism they too became God’s children. Anointed by water and the spirit, these world’s newest christs are called to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. They are called to see the face of God in every stranger’s face, loving neighbor as self. They are called to commit to be the walking, talking good news of God in the flesh by following in the teaching and the prayers and the practice and the fellowship of all those christs who have gone before us. I know it may seem as if I’m being provocative by calling them christs, but Meister Eckart once said that he heard Christ whispering in his ear: “I became human for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.” We baptized Christians are anointed. This is what Sister Martha was getting at when she spoke about the saints in her life.

So today we remember the saints known and unknown, even as we add to their numbers. Tomorrow we will acknowledge grieve, and celebrate the loved ones we have lost, “from the viewpoint of this world” as Cynthia Bourgeault puts it. I much rather call it Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) than All Souls Day because it reminds me of the finality of death that challenges me to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. And I don’t mean eternal life as the perpetuation of time, on and on, which quite frankly seems to me an awful idea, but the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. 

Dia de los Muertos rather then All Souls Day seems to me also more in line with the Christian belief of the resurrection of the body, the experience that soul and body are existentially one in the human person. But the body we call our own in this sense is not limited to our skins. As Brother David Steidl-Rast describes it: “It comprises all those elements of the cosmos by which we have expressed our own personal uniqueness; it is the total person. And the resurrection of life, as St. Paul sees it, is a new creation of the total person, soul and body, by God who alone provides the continuity between the old and the new life.”

On my Altar del Día de los Muertos are some of those saints who gave and lost themselves to the Christ-self within them, to universal interrelatedness in love. They practiced what Ghandi called the “Evangelism of the Rose”. They were so beautifully who God made them to be, their fragrance led others to want to hang around them. They were the saints in my life who embodied the faith so clearly, I not only wanted it for myself, but also wanted to create my own job description for those who come after me. A hundred years from now, God willing, someone will remember us for handing on what was handed to us. May we all engage the rite of passage of these three holy days and till the inner soil of our hearts for the mystery of the Incarnation that lies ahead. 

¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!

Amen+

All Saints B - October 31, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

All Saints B - Sunday, October 31, 2021

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved and the Love everflowing.

I surprised myself by wanting to talk to you about our passage from Revelation today. This book is also known as the Apocalypse. Under that name, it evokes portentous catastrophes and strife between good and evil. The Apocalypse is often seen as predictions of last things; the last things that will ever happen on this Earth as we know it. Whether those predictions are metaphorical or factual depends on who you ask. My sense is that they don’t make sense as literal descriptions of end times.

In fact, the Book of Revelation was written as an unveiling of God’s ultimate purpose for Christian communities contemporary to the writing of the book. Those communities lived throughout the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the first century of the current era. Revelation was written as a way of encouraging these Asia Minor communities to continue the Christian life in the face of oppression under Roman Emperor Domitian. It was written to encourage them all to be everyday saints.

Most likely there was a pressure for Christians to participate in the imperial cult's religious festivals. This probably involved a threat of punishment or death if they did not partake of the emperor’s cult.

Christians didn’t weigh much in the face of the Roman Empire. After all, they were just members of a heretical wing of a minority faith (Judaism) barely tolerated by a human empire. They were utterly expendable.

*****

Whatever the circumstances in which the Book of Revelation was written, I trust that nowadays it needs to be read as a figurative account of the struggle between good and evil. 

The book has a moral purpose that transcends its immediate circumstances and purpose. That’s why we can still read this book and learn from it today.

This symbolic view of the book is still controversial in many Christian spheres. As Roger Ferlo writes: “The book of Revelation can be a happy hunting ground for bigots and fanatics, and the distortion of its purpose and meanings are as rampant today as they were two millenia ago.”

*****

Today’s passage from the book of Revelation points to the creation of a new community in unmediated communion with God. God will be in the midst of all God’s saints and all saints will be with God.

And the creation of that community is the purpose of history. God is the beginning and the end of history; the Alpha and the Omega. 

We come in-between those points amongst generations of our kind to be instruments of God’s love in building such community. The communion of the whole of Creation with God is the purpose of history. History and time will become irrelevant when that full communion happens.

The apostle John paints a vivid picture of what that community - shall we call it the Beloved Community - looks like. 

Death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more. God wipes every tear from our eyes. Emmanuel is tangibly with us. The Trinity dwells with us. And we dwell within the Trinity. The world, both heaven and earth, are renewed, not done away with. The cosmos is redeemed and perfected. 

The apostle John uses metaphors that rely on time and space because that is what we know and understand. But this renewed reality will be with God in an unmediated way. And God is beyond time and space. 

So the writer can only summon up visions that evoke what it will feel like while using time and space to make us apprehend this new reality. This will not be a restoration of our broken world to its imagined original or virginal state. 

It will be but a transformation beyond imagining. Still, John invites us to imagine what it would be like to live with the Divine as our neighbor in the new Jerusalem.

*****

You see, all creation and all redemption are one eternal movement of God’s Spirit, a movement that exists and has existed in every moment.

It existed from the creation of the universe at the beginning of time; to the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord. It exists to the new creation at the apocalypse.

All these steps of salvation history are part of one eternally present movement of God’s Spirit.

Revelation and unveiling can happen anywhere, any time. Revelation and unveiling are the moments when the absolute reality announces itself to us in the midst of our human lives, when we can see, if only for a brief moment, the luminosity of our own selves and of all the created world. These are the moments when the shining garment of God’s body that is present in all people and all things becomes visible to us, if we only have eyes to see.

And those moments can happen and do happen to any of us at any time. It can happen to exceptional and everyday saints alike.

*****

Today, on the eve of All Hallows, the other name for All Saints, we view existence from the perspective of eternity. All generations are called blessed. They coexist irrespective of time in the same instant of God’s Love.  

Today, we honor saints who have come before us, maybe a few years ago, or centuries ago, whose examples we wish to follow. And also the saints who are alive today, those we know, those we live with and those we don’t. And also the saints who will come after us.

Today, we remember that we belong to the communion of saints, past, present and future, because we all are beloved children of God. In this holy community we partake of the divine today and every day.

*****

Beloved Lord, help us to spot the saints around us; help us to spot the saint in the mirror; help us learn from the saints; that we may see with your light and build your community of Love with You, here and now and forever. 

Amen.

All Saint, November 1, 2020, Middlebury, VT

St Stephen's Episcopal Church, Middlebury, VT, West Park, NY

Br. Rober Leo Sevensky, OHC

All Saints  - Sunday, November 1, 2020

Revelation 7:9-17 1 John 3:1-3 Matthew 5:1-12

Many of you may be familiar with the term Sacred Triduum. It is the title given in church circles to the last three days of Holy Week, specifically to the period from the evening of Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday. Triduum simply means three days, and those three days constitute a pivotal moment in the spiritual and worship life of the Christian community. 

Some years ago, the contemporary Christian writer and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault began to draw attention to another kind of sacred triduum, to what she calls the fall or autumn triduum as opposed to the spring or Holy Week one. And what she is referring to is the period that we are in the midst of right now, the three days spanning Halloween, the feast of All Saints, and the commemoration of all the faithful departed popularly known as All Souls Day. Bourgeault says that these three days: “…do in fact comprise their own sacred passage which is not only authentic in and of itself, but also a powerful mirror image of the energy flowing through the spring triduum.”  

Both periods are about the passage from death to life, a passage which is at the heart of the Christian mystical path, though the fall one is much more interior, personal and reflective, with its own peculiar perspective and tone, shaped as it is by nature and the natural symbols and events that surround us, at least in this northern hemisphere.  Whereas in spring we are comforted by signs of new life and of nature putting forth hints of new growth that help us reflect on the promise of resurrection, in the fall we see signs of passing away, of limits, of change, and of death and decay along with the poignant beauty which accompanies it and which, in a normal year, draws legions to places like Vermont to share in that yearly spectacle. 

Even as a child I was fascinated by these three days, at once magical, frightening, transformative and transfiguring. From the excitement of Halloween, wandering streets with friends dressed and camouflaged as an alter ego and well before the days of helicopter parents, to the solemnity of church on All Saints Day to our ethnic tradition of lighting candles on the graves of our ancestors on All Souls evening, there was a unity and a mystery which was palpable. 

There is of course something of nostalgia here, and not everyone has this kind of history or connection. 

But we can still ask ourselves what this fall triduum means for us today, this year, here and now. 

In preparing for this message, I came across the title of a talk by a Unitarian minister who, in speaking of these three days, used three words: scared, scarred, and sacred.  These words aptly describe this triduum not only in general but especially this year of 2020. They capture our situation and our shared journey accurately and forcefully.  

Let's start with scared.  Halloween, the first day of our triduum, is indeed scary. It's supposed to be. We confront, and intentionally so, forces and beings that seem both dangerous and beyond our control, and through our revelry and costuming we enter them, face them, and even mock them. It’s the time for gory costumes and horror movies. But this year we don't need Halloween to frighten us. God knows, we have more than enough reason to be scared at the state of things. There is of course the Covid pandemic reminding us daily of sickness, hardship, and death. And there is the national election, which is underway now, one in which the stakes are critical and whose results will be, without exaggeration, of historic proportions.  

The outcome remains uncertain, and its follow-up may well lead to violence and civil unrest. We see a body politic and a civil society deeply, deeply divided and antagonistic. And all of this of course plays out against the background of climate change and the unveiling of racial disparities and inequities that are part of a pattern of systemic racism in our nation. Yes, we are scared, and we have every reason to be.  And it's hard to see how our Halloween traditions can help us to confront these shadows and our hidden societal selves, though that is what we are called to do.  

Scared, yes. And scarred. For none of us comes through life without being wounded. And these days are now filled with a pain and grief which scars both body and psyche, soul and conscience. In this context, I think of the remembrance of all the faithful departed which is All Souls Day. We remember all those people whom we have known who have touched our lives, for better and for worse, those dear and not so dear ones who have been part of the fabric of our own story. And in remembering them, we simultaneously remember ourselves and our own process of becoming. 

There is a beautiful hymn our Episcopal hymnal appointed for burials, number 357. The words are contemporary though the haunting melody is late medieval: 

Think, O Lord, in mercy on the souls of those, who, in faith gone from us, now in death repose. Here mid stress and conflict toils can never cease; there, the warfare ended, bid them rest in peace.

Often were they wounded in the deadly strife; heal them, Good Physician, with the balm of life. Every taint of evil, frailty and decay, good and gracious Savior, cleanse and purge away.

We are all wounded by life and need the healing of the Good Physician. We are all scarred.  But remember: so is Jesus.  And his wounds have become glorious.  So, too, may ours.

And here we are today, All Saints Day, smack in the middle of this Fall Triduum, scared and scarred to be sure.  But also held up by and called closer and closer toward the Sacred, the Holy One, in whose image and likeness we are made and whose destiny is to be restored to that image and likeness in all its fullness.  What I love about All Saints Day is that it directs our gaze to men and women in whom we see glimmers—and more than glimmers—of the truth and power of that call lived out in trying circumstances, circumstances not so different from our own. We see men and women who, perhaps for the whole of their lifetimes or perhaps for just one brief, shining moment, mirrored and re-presented that creative and compassionate Love that made us and sustains us all.  In doing this, they were changed, sanctified and became for others—and I hope for themselves as well—burning and shining lights.  

God has numbered us among a vast company of believers, a cloud of witnesses whose examples and prayers encourage us to go on and to go on together, through and beyond this pandemic, beyond this election, and beyond our own uncertainties, doubts, fears and follies.  If they came safely through the great ordeal, as Revelation tells us, washing their robes in the blood of the Lamb, so can I and so can you and so can we all.

Cynthia Bourgeault ended her brief article on the Fall Triduum with these words:  “I encourage all of you who have the inclination to keep these days as best you can for this quiet but extraordinary rite of passage.”  Scared, scarred, sacred. Reflect on and face our fears.  Tend our wounds. Say aloud the names that call out to us for remembrance. Light a candle. Cultivate stillness.  Be at peace.

God is God.  Let God’s will be done…today, tomorrow, Tuesday and beyond. 

Amen.

All Saints - November 1, 2020

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owern, OHC

All Saints  - Sunday, November 1, 2020

Revelation 7:9-17 1 John 3:1-3 Matthew 5:1-12

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the one God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

The way of sanctity is a hidden way. It lies in plain sight, but only revealed to the eyes of faith. With the eyes of the heart opened through the surrender of our whole self to God, we begin to see the logic of the universe: a logic in which power is fulfilled in weakness, love is made perfect in seeming loss, and life flows from the heart of death. 

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in a collection of talks we’ve come to call Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, assures us that “[Sanctity] does not require miracles; [miralces] are only for the benefit of those who need such testimonies and signs. Faithful souls do not rely on them. Content in their unknowing, they leave them to be a light for others, and accept for themselves what is most ordinary: God’s order, God’s way which tests their faith by concealing, not revealing himself.” 

There are, of course, many holy souls whose examples draw us closer to God. But “hidden in the Church, too, are countless saints who are made only to shine in heaven, who shed no light in this life and who live and die in complete obscurity.”

Today we remember and give thanks for all of God’s saints—those known to us by their wonderful deeds and testimony. But also, and perhaps especially, for that band of silent witnesses known only to God, whose lives of submission and surrender uphold and sustain our pilgrimage without our ever knowing it.

This hidden way of sanctity is a way of undoing and unknowing. 

In the daily confrontation with ourselves we have the opportunity to loosen our hold on our own righteousness, our own strength, and our own assured judgment of good and evil. In so doing, we learn to rely solely on God’s goodness and God’s mercy. After a lifetime of surrender to what Caussade poetically calls “the sacrament of the present moment,” we begin to cultivate the saintly virtue of “holy indifference,” which is the conviction that, whatever the outward appearance of things, in the silence of God’s heart, God is bringing all things to their perfection. 

This task is difficult, to put it mildly. The world around us looks so dark and so frightening. And often, the world within looks just as fearsome.

It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an apocalypse and at the precipice of a holocaust. I don’t think most of us could have imagined how bad the last four years would get. And in the midst of such chaos, we might agree with Caussade that God often seems to be concealing, not revealing, herself.

John’s apocalyptic vision warns us from too easily judging God’s purpose by what we see around us. Like Paul, he knew that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12) John’s community, like ours, was surrounded with political and religious hypocrisy. They, too, saw the wicked triumph. They, too, stared into the bloody maw of an evil born of the marriage of power and religion and fed by bigotry and violence. 

But to John God unveiled—apocalpysed—God’s hidden work of salvation. God assured John, and assures us now, that however deep this present darkness, God is, even here and even now, making all things new.

Facing similar persecution in the late second century, Tertullian reminded his community that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Where the blood of the martyrs is spilled, a new creation is born. Golgotha is unmasked as the new Eden and the Cross of Jesus as the Tree of Life.

All sanctity, which is to say all sainthood, flows from the blood of martyrdom, from the seed of a defeat that is the truest kind of victory. All those we revere for their holy lives were and are martyrs, which is to say both that their whole lives read as a living testimony to the self-sacrificing love of God and that they each, in their particular way, surrendered the entirety of themselves to God’s purpose, holding nothing back, clinging to nothing, becoming nothing so that, in them and through them, God could become everything.

Not every saint, of course, was or is called to a bloody and violent end. Many, perhaps, most of them poured out their lives in quieter quarters—feeding the poor, forming and teaching souls, proclaiming God’s favor to those on the margins, or leading lives of contemplation, quietly suffering death day after day in their cells so that, crucified with Christ, Christ might live in them.

And yet, when we start down the road to the Cross, we must accept, and even come to celebrate the fact that we may be called quite literally to lay down our lives in witness to God’s loving mercy. The time in which we live may demand such witness, not made hastily in the spirit of self-assertion but made humbly in gratitude for the enormous gift of God’s tender mercy and in service to all God’s children. Such lives, surrendered and returned to the one from whom they sprang, shine like the morning star calling us all home to God.

A little later in John’s revelation, we read that those robed in white “have conquered [the evil one] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death.” The Greek translated ‘the word of their testimony,’ is […] literally ‘the logic of their martyrdom.’

Our brother Roy, himself a great and often hidden witness to God’s mercy, commented on this verse that “Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can.

“When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their powers and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love—continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.”

We must not hang our hope on defeating the political and religious darkness of this present age. No matter the results of Tuesday’s election, the world will still be plagued by racism and the rape of the earth and its peoples. Power and violence will still have their say. That is not to say that our political reality is inconsequential, or that we Christians being formed for sanctity should withdraw from political engagement. No, our faith impels us to witness in every area of our lives. 

But we must not put our trust in rulers nor in any child of earth. Our salvation belongs to God alone. It is for that very reason that we must never despair of God’s mercy, whatever the outward appearance of our time and place or of our own lives.

“I have learned by experience,” wrote Thomas Cranmer to Peter Martyr “[...] that God never shines forth more brightly, and pours out the beams of his mercy and consolation, or of strength and firmness of spirit, more clearly or impressively upon the minds of his people, than when they are under the most extreme pain and distress, both of mind and body, that he may then more especially show himself to be the God of his people, when he seems to have altogether forsaken them; then raising them up when they think he is bringing them low; then glorifying them when he is thought to be confounding them; then quickening them when he is thought to be destroying them.”

No, Jesus does not conquer Rome, and nor will we conquer the racist and oppressive empires that threaten our world today. But encouraged by the martyrdom of the whole host of the sanctified that surround us, God can make us into a living apocalypse a doorway to the kingdom of heaven, hidden in plain sight, through which God may enter the world to be with her people.

May it be so. Amen. 

All Saints Year C - Friday, November 1, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
All Saints - Proper 25 - Sunday, October 27, 2019

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Throughout history humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with their ancestors. I think the notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” They were offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living. This feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance. What we are up to today is recognizing our sainthood and remembering those who have gone before us---all of us joined in this communion of saints. In such company we find comfort in our losses, courage for daily struggles, and hope as we face the future together.

The passage from Ephesians offers a commanding declaration about faith and salvation. The writer declares that the church is made up of those who chose to hope in Christ. The ending prayer for the Ephesians proposes a way which God, through Christ, brings all who believe into unity---a unity in time and across time. Those who have died and those who are living are one in Christ. Those who have died are already raised and those who are living are already marked for resurrection through baptism. The oneness of all things in Christ is our inheritance as saints. We are all in this together.

We live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in that divine Love that birthed us all. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. We are all one, just at different stages, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people as a whole, and never just to one individual.

Consider how this awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. Weighing, measuring, counting, listing, labeling, and comparing go so far. The Gospel is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in this Divine Love. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything.

The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. Our shadow is any part of ourselves or our institutions that we try to hide or deny. Nonviolence, weakness, and simplicity are part of the American shadow. The larger and deeper shadow for Western individuals and culture is actually failure itself. Our success-driven culture scorns failure, powerlessness, and any form of poverty. We reject vulnerability and seek dominance instead, and we elect leaders who falsely promise us the same. In the United States today, white dominant culture prizes competition, urgency, individualism, and logic. Cooperation, self-care, and community are seen as inferior. Our Gospel today incorporates failure into a new definition of spiritual success. Luke shows that Jesus is fulfilling God’s compassion by living it with the oppressed and those on the margins and convicting those who are certain that they are righteous. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount by praising “the poor”! That should tell us how thoroughly we have missed the point of the Gospel. We avoid the very things that Jesus praises as we try to project a strong, secure, successful image to ourselves and the world. The beatitudes offer a foundation for holy living, clarifying, strengthening, and directing us in this life.

The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness, oneness in Christ. Being Church means overcoming barriers. We cause so much harm and lose so much possibility by fearing our differences. Ultimate power is grounded not in rulers and authorities, but in God. Christ’s authority is evident in the church of which Christ is the head, and which shares in the fullness of salvation already, even as that fullness is being fulfilled.

To refuse the dark side is to store up the darkness. We are dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark. We know the plagues of bad things in our day as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, gun violence, imprisoning refugees, and climate change.  Daniel knew those of his day and he reminds us of God’s promise to redeem, even in the face of injustice.  It’s easy to become disillusioned and to give up hope. But for the saints, God’s ultimate stand against all evil is sealed in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Any repair of our fractured world must start with those who have the insight and courage to own their shadow, so as to tap into greater compassion and creativity to live as our True Self—which is Love. We come to full consciousness by facing our own contradictions, mistakes, and failings. There is no shortage of opportunities to discover our personal or corporate shadow, especially in a monastic community. According to Jung, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” [1] God cannot be found out there until God is first found within ourselves. Then we can naturally see God in others and in all of creation. What we seek is what we are. The search for God and the search for our True Self are finally the same search. To fail in this is to deny one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.

Paul prays for his hearers that their hearts may be enlightened, so that they may know the hope to which Christ calls them. When we see only with our eyes or hear only with our ears, we may fail to claim the hope instilled in us. To see with the heart is to imagine the future which God is preparing. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future into which we are living, and by the convictions by which we are living. Hope is best perceived with the eyes of the heart. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. Our feast today invites each of us to claim our place in their company.  +Amen.


[1] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books: 1989), 247.

All Saints - Year B - Thursday, November 1, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
All Saints - Sunday, October 28, 2018

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

“Jesus began to weep.”  “God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Sometimes everything just clicks.  Sometimes there are moments when we are alive and happy in a way beyond the ordinary.  I could list decades-worth of such moments from all over the world: certainly in this place, a beach in Texas, a bar in South Carolina, the side of a highway looking at Denali near Fairbanks, Alaska, a game park in Africa, over pasta in Assisi, a seminary chapel in Toronto… 

The one thing they all have in common is that they were moments with people I love, in a beautiful place, with laughter and feasting, whether spiritual or physical.  These moments were not just about the moment, they were glimpses of a home for which my soul longs.  That’s why I didn’t want those times to end.  I could have stayed forever.  But they did end. We part ways, go back to ordinary reality.  Sometimes we say we will keep in touch, but almost always we move on, lose contact.  

Within the joy of the moment is already the sting of loss, waiting to remind me that it was only a moment.  Communion in community begun and ended tells us something about what it is to be human.  We were not made for goodbyes.  Not originally.  Goodbyes, whether in distance or death are not part of how the world was designed to work.  It is tempting to rationalize our grief as inevitable, mask the reality of it with a shrug of the shoulder and an “oh, well.”  But that is not the way we were designed to be, either.

We were designed for close, lasting, abiding communion – for moments that never have to come to an end.  And so the reality of ending and distance and death forces upon us an alien experience that has invaded the Eden for which we were made and set us wandering into a foreign land.

The Bible is wonderfully honest and powerfully poetic about our plight.  Within its narrative, we are caught between being kicked out of Paradise in one direction and the new Jerusalem of some scary apocalyptic future in the other.  What to do?  Do we bet everything on this life, cling to the tangible, to what seems secure or risk everything on a promise that sounds too good to be true?  That is an important question in the Bible, but in the meantime, we are here.  

The Bible’s answer to our present is to have us set up camp in the fierce and barren landscape of mortality and let it teach us about yearning and connection and grief and hope.  If we dare do that, dare to encounter our present condition, at times we will weep.  When our frailty and mortality are visited upon us and those we love, we let out all the contradiction and confusion through our eyes.  Thus the Bible is loaded with weeping.  From Hagar weeping for Ishmael, Abraham for Sarah, Jacob for Joseph lost and found again, Rachel for her children, Mary Magdalene at the feet of Jesus, and Jesus himself both here at the tomb of Lazarus and over Jerusalem as he enters on Palm Sunday, to name but a few.

“You have noted my lamentation; put my tears into your bottle; are they not recorded in your book?” Says the psalmist.  We know, sometimes only vaguely and intuitively, but especially in times of pain and grief, that we were made for something more, some other home, and so, caught between Eden and new Jerusalem, we all stand and lift our lament at the tomb of all the mourning and crying and pain and death that has visited us.  Perhaps God is saving our tears for something, recording their number for some future purpose.  The story does not leave us disconsolate at the grave, of course, it beckons us home.

I don’t recommend interpreting the Revelation to John literally.  It will lead to nothing but trouble, trust me.  Rather, it is sufficient to say that God, in God’s own time and in God’s own way, will bring this world to a merciful and just end and usher in the kingdom of heaven on earth.  As J.R.R. Tolkien has Frodo say in The Hobbit, “everything sad will come untrue.”  The rest of the book you can do with whatever you like.  And good luck.  

Except the reading from chapter 21 we hear today.  That is literal.  Call me a fundamentalist, I don’t care, but it better be true, it better happen.  I’ve staked my life on it being true.  The truth declared in the reading is that of the moment when the kingdom is come, Satan is destroyed, God is among us, dwelling with us forever.  

And what is the first thing that God does in this new dwelling-with-us world?  Wipe every tear from our eyes!  Of course.  However my body is to be resurrected, I take my tears with me.  My tears will go with me to the new Jerusalem.  They are the way I am known.  They are counted.  They are the record of my willingness to live, even in the face of pain and death.  And with my tears are most certainly my memories of where each came from, for whom each was shed, and then the joyful relief beyond words when I know that not one more will be added to my bottle, when we hear that every source of tears, every reason for the pain of separation and death, is gone forever.  

Tears last as long as this world lasts, because as long as this world is, there will always be something to weep about.  As the world is made new, so are our faces.  There is no grander, bolder, more triumphant language in all the Bible than this – fitting for the greatest moment in the universe - to be finally and forever and perfectly home.  And yet it is as intimate and tender as a teardrop on a grief- stained face.  

The hints in Revelation and Hebrews point to something going on, which is what we celebrate today; that those who have gone before us in death are living witnesses of us and for us, and though in God’s presence and free from sin and pain and sorrow, still awaiting the end of tears just as we are.  On that day, God, together with them, knowing every tear we have shed, wipes the last evidence of our earthly wandering, and then invites us all into a party, where with saints and heroes and family and friends and all who have welcomed the mercy of God, we enjoy at long last an endless moment – an endless alleluia of feasting, wine, laughter and memories tearlessly, painlessly, deathlessly, for ever and ever shared. 

Amen.       

All Saints Day, Year A: November 1, 2017

All Saints Day 2017

Matthew 5:1-12

The Rev. Matthew Wright

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

The Rev. Matthew Wright

“Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord…”  “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints…”

Today, All Saints’ Day, the Church celebrates the mystery of our interdependence—what our creeds call “the Communion of Saints,” or in the words of today’s Collect, the “mystical body” in which we are all “knit together.”  And the saints, of course, are simultaneously all of us and also, particularly, those great exemplars who show us our full possibility and potential. Those of us on the way of Jesus are at one and the same time his saints, and we are becoming his saints.

Our Gospel for today’s feast is Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, etc.”  And the word “blessed” we still apply to saints today, the great exemplary ones—“the Blessed Virgin Mary,” “Blessed James Huntington.”  And we get a much better sense of what Jesus was up to with this word if we look at the Aramaic that underlies the New Testament Greek. The word for “blessed” that Jesus would have used in his own language is the Aramaic tubwayhun, which literally means “ripe” or “ready for the picking”—a word from the agrarian culture Jesus grew up in. And when that word is used in reference to people, it can mean mature, integrated, whole, complete.

So right there is a basic Christian teaching—that there’s a trajectory in Christian life towards becoming ripened human fruit, and also the possibility to be unripe, immature. And so our growth into our own “blessed” possibility is our natural ripening process—which means that sainthood and sanctity aren’t something that take us out of our humanity; they’re instead the natural unfolding of a life fully and authentically lived.

And so I encourage you to go back sometime and meditate on the beatitudes as the conditions for human ripening: blessed, ripe, mature, are those who mourn—those who stay sensitive and close to the suffering of the world; ripe, full in sweetness and flavor, are the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart. In the Beatitudes, Jesus is laying out the conditions for our ripening, for our becoming fully human beings.

Significantly, our tradition tells us that this ripening process doesn’t happen in isolation, as individuals, but in communion, in interdependence. One of the more interesting Anglican thinkers of the 20th century who really got this was a man named Charles Williams. He was a member of the Inklings, the literary circle that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and he wrote everything from theology—his book The Descent of the Dove chronicles the history of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church—to “metaphysical thrillers” like War in Heaven and Descent into Hell.

The golden thread running through everything he wrote, however, is a doctrine he called “Co-inherence”—and along with it a corollary practice that he named “substituted love.”  For Williams, this was another way of understanding everything from the Communion of Saints to the Trinity to the Incarnation. Co-inherence teaches that we are all interwoven, that we co-inhere in each other. This is the teaching at the heart of the Incarnation—the Divine and the human co-inhering. The Trinity, of course, is the co-inherence, the interabiding, that exists within the very life of God. And the Eucharist received is the co-inherence of Christ in us, us in Christ, and God in matter.

Williams taught that our whole life unfolds in this Great Co-inherence, beginning in the womb of our mother, with whom we intimately interabide, and continuing in baptism, when we’re incorporated into a Body that is, God willing, trying to consciously live out this co-inherence. We live this out through acts of “substituted love”—William’s interpretation of St. Paul’s teaching that we are to “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).

The truth is, it’s simply the nature of things that we bear one another’s burdens, whether we like it or not. Future generations will bear the burden of climate change. Today we bear inherited burdens from a history of slavery and racism. But for Williams, a saint, a Christian, is someone who consciously bears and works to relieve the burdens of another, knowing that someone else is already carrying a burden for you. And he believed that within the Communion of Saints we bear burdens together across time and space and distance. Maybe you, in your life now, are carrying and healing a burden for your grandmother. Or maybe for someone who has yet to be born.

This is the mystery of the Communion of Saints and substituted love. And, of course, Jesus is our Great Substitution in Love—we believe that, somehow, across time, he carries our burdens, and that we, bound up in his Mystical Body, are called to do the same for one another. In this light, I want to share with you a story from Mother Virginia Brown, one of the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church and a founding member of the Rivendell Community. She writes:

"My father, a history professor, had been very ill with Parkinson’s, and toward the end he was quite confused. Yet when I visited him in the hospital, he was intent on communicating something to me, something important. He said he was working on a gift for us, and it was almost finished. He willed me to understand, I thought, that it was the gift of his life. And he told me, “I can look in a certain direction, and see children being fed.”  What I understood by that was that he knew he was doing some spiritual work for others by his patient suffering, and I believe he knew I understood. (It wasn’t something I tried to tell anyone else about—not till later.)

[The day after he died], my friend Cathy, who had also loved my father very much, was driving along the road to Nashville. It was spring, and the median was filled with poppies so gorgeous that she couldn’t take her eyes off them. Suddenly, she told me, she saw my father, there among the poppies. He was sitting down, surrounded by children, and was feeding each of them in turn with a spoon. In his arms he held a baby she recognized:  it was Becky, her daughter whom she had adopted in Haiti, having found her nearly dead of starvation, a six-month old baby weighing five pounds, too weak to move. Becky did live and grow up, and is now an adoptive mother herself—of six children. But Cathy saw her as that emaciated baby—but now, she was being fed, and was smiling and content. Then my father looked directly at Cathy, smiled, and said, “Here, everything is remembered, everything forgotten, and everything known in joy.”

Across the chasm of time and death, somehow, my father’s self-offering, his weakness and suffering, had helped comfort and sustain a Haitian baby on the point of death. Who would have imagined such a thing?  Yet when she told me about it I remembered how he had talked about seeing children being fed, out of the corner of his eye—as though he had been obliquely aware of it, though he couldn’t express it directly." 

We could easily write stories like this off as hopeful, wishful thinking. The hallucinations of a dying man and the grief-induced fantasies of a bereaved woman. But Charles Williams would say this is exactly how the Communion of Saints works—that we are constantly bearing one another’s burdens, in ways visible and invisible, known and unknown, across time and space and distance. And the only difference, we might say, between us and a saint is that a saint consents to bear these burdens willingly, consciously, and joyfully.

There’s great comfort in a teaching like this because it reminds us that we are never alone in our suffering or dying and that our burdens are always shared, even when we may not see or know it. 

Evelyn Underhill, another 20th century Anglican mystic who greatly influenced Williams, put it this way: “When we are confounded by sudden visions of a holiness and self-abandonment beyond our span, our share in the Communion of Saints assures us that other souls will suffer and adore for us, and make up for our deficiencies by their more abundant life. For since the life of the saints is the life of charity, they cannot keep anything for themselves alone. The Life by which they live is shared, communicated from one to another, as the sap of the Vine is given through the greater branches to the less.”

And so may we all grow as branches on the one Vine, bringing forth the ripened fruit of our humanity, and, held in the Great Co-inherence of the Saints, may we bear one another’s burdens consciously, willingly, and joyfully.

The last word I give to Charles Williams: “Blessed be He that He has made us members one of another and all members of Him… Blessed be He that He has quickened among [us] the unity, exchange, and substitution of love which is the pattern of Himself… Blessed be He that He continually makes all things new.”

And blessed be God in the saints. Amen.