All Saints & All Souls

Sunday 3 November 2019

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

This weekend we mark both All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, or the Commemoration of the faithful departed. All Saints’ Day is the day when we remember all those who have walked with God before us, in every time and place. Some are so famous, we know them by name: Saint Francis, for example, or St Theresa. But the overwhelming majority, we cannot identify. In the course of the redevelopment of Town Green taking place at the moment, five bodies were unearthed. We have no way of identifying them, buried as they were in a time of communal and unmarked parish graves (if you were considered important enough, a plaque inside the church will record your name and the words, the grave is near) and so we reinterred them, respectfully, with prayers; because part of what we remember on All Saints’ Day is the reality that being human is bigger than even our collective memory. Being human is rooted in God, who knows us better than we know ourselves.

All Souls’ Day is the day when we remember those we knew, who have gone ahead of us. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it is a remembrance of those in purgatory, the Church penitent, those being purified for heaven. Officially, the Church of England rejects the notion of purgatory (see the Articles of Religion, number XXII) but there is something to be understood in the process of entrusting those we love to God, a process that is not done-and-dusted at the funeral service. And so this evening we will remember people before God, reading out their names and lighting a candle for each one, as we recognise the in-between space that needs to be navigated between this life and no longer remembered by anyone except the God who holds us safe until the resurrection.

I’m reading a novel at the moment, set in a sheltered housing community, in which the primary narrator is being disempowered by the staff (however well-meaning) and empowered by two friends. It is a fascinating exploration of our sense of self. And there are at least three selves we possess.

Self 1 is first-person self-awareness, the awareness that I exist in the world, that I am not you nor the world, that I experience the world in this present moment from my own perspective. This has begun to take shape before our first birthday, and we never lose it. Even if I cannot remember my name, or know where I am, or put a name to your face, we never lose this sense of self.

Self 2 relates to our attributes, and our opinions attached to those attributes; to our biographies, and our beliefs attached to them. I have brown hair, but am jealous of my peers who are already silver foxes. I am a husband, a father, a vicar of sorts. I am a Christian, a member of the church. Self 2 changes over the course of our lives: for twenty-three years, I was not a husband, and for twenty-three years, I have been. Self 2 changes when we marry, when we divorce, when we are widowed; when we are promoted at work, or made redundant, or retire; when we take a chance to fulfil a dream we long thought was beyond us, and when we realise that in chasing one dream we have missed out on something that mattered more to us. Self 2 changes, sometimes incrementally, sometimes suddenly, but we carry all of our previous Self 2s with us. Self 2 is storied: when we recall the past, it is not factual recall, but the crafting of an edited story that helps (and sometimes hinders) us in the present. And Self 2 is also impacted by those things we have pushed away into the corners of the room of our life, and try to ignore. Sometimes who we are is hidden from ourselves by the stories we tell and the memories we push away, even when we believe we know exactly who we are, for now.

Self 3 is and can only constructed with others. You can train to be a teacher, but you can’t be a teacher without pupils who recognise you. You can decide to be a good friend, but you cannot be a good friend without people who recognise you as such. As we get older, Self 3 can run into difficulties. Those who have known us well become fewer, as colleagues retire, as siblings die. We may find ourselves surrounded by those who do not know our history, nursing home staff who only see a little old woman struggling to adjust to changes to Self 2. A retired headmistress, frustrated by certain losses, further frustrated at being treated like a wilfully ignorant child. Elder isolation is as damaging to us as a lifetime of cigarettes. Self 3 is where the church has such a key role to play, as a community in the world, but also as a community that stretches beyond the present through All Souls to All Saints.

It is revealed to Daniel that empires rise, and empires fall, but that ‘the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever.’ Paul writes of this kingdom to the saints in Ephesus, as participating in ‘the riches of [Christ’s] glorious inheritance among the saints.’ And in our Gospel reading, Jesus declares the contours of this kingdom, of this inheritance, where the experience of weakness opens up a state of blessed union with God that the powerful can neither imagine nor know.

The world sees progression from the peak of achievement, of fame, of influence, to the unravelling of these things that begins in old age and continues through our dying and, eventually, the death of everyone who knew us or even knew of us, as tragedy. As failure and injustice. For if our identity depends on Self 2—‘I think, therefore I am’—and my thinking is compromised, I am being erased. If our identity depends on a Self 3 self that is determined solely by other humans, who are themselves being erased, then, as what you think of me is compromised, I am being further erased, until we are forgotten.

But for the Christian, this is not how we see things. The Church tells another story. Our various traditions differ in the details, but we share one common hope. We dare to believe, together, that God has given us a spirit of wisdom and revelation, has opened the eyes of our heart, so that we can know that our identity is found in union with Christ and in the ongoing and immeasurably great power of God acting for us: to remember us, to raise Christ for us and set him over all things for us, to express the fullness of Life in and through us. We are moving from death to life; from independence from God to union with God. We are not being erased, but being saved by the grace of God.

This gives us great freedom, not only to not fear the process before us, but to support those who desperately fight against the ways in which God and nature and time and eternity conspire to save us from ourselves. This also has very practical implications for how we love one another, and love our neighbour as ourselves, as we, and they, have the layers we have built up stripped away. We are discovering this more and more together, often over food and in the guise of idle gossip that steps back and forth between the present and the past, and it is a gift. And these annual All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days remind us of the hope at the heart of our faith. So come, and share in Communion, in the communion of saints, in the body of Christ, in the hope of glory. Come, and receive sustenance for body and soul. Come, and find yourself, once again, remembered alongside your sisters and brothers in Christ. Come.