All Saints' Day 2020

 

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

By now I am sure that you will have heard the news that, as of one minute past midnight on Thursday, we will be going back into a lockdown. As in the first time around, it looks most likely that church services will be suspended, and we must prepare ourselves for that to happen.

This has been a hard year, and Lockdown 2 comes as a bitter, if not entirely unexpected, blow. If lockdown heading into summer was hard, lockdown heading into winter will be harder. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Based on her observations of people experiencing grief, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified five emotional stages. These have since been somewhat discredited, in that there is no empirical evidence that everyone goes through all of them, or in any particular order, or that we ever get beyond loss. Nonetheless, they are recognisable to us. Denial: don’t worry, things will have changed again by Thursday, it won’t happen. Anger: the students are to blame for this! Yet more incompetence from the government! Bargaining: we should be recognised as an essential service; perhaps there is a loophole we can exploit? Depression: we know mental ill health has risen this year, due to sustained uncertainty exacerbated by isolation. Acceptance: or at least resignation, though they are not the same. Perhaps you recognise some or all of these emotional states, in yourself or in those around you.

William Worden focused not on the emotional responses to grief but, rather, on the four tasks of grieving. These four tasks do not necessarily follow on one after the other, but they may give purpose to mourning. The first task is to accept the loss. Whether the death of a loved one, or being made redundant, or retirement, or the empty nest when children leave home, loss is an inevitable part of life, and something we need to wrestle with God through the night if we are to receive blessing.

The second task is to acknowledge the pain of the loss. All loss involves pain, even if little losses are less painful that major losses. The biblical template for acknowledging the pain of loss is lament. Our Scriptures are full of lament. There is no place for the English stiff-upper-lip holding back of tears. If the doors of our churches are to close, even for a month, even if they will then reopen, there is a pain to that, which it is right and proper to recognise.

The third task of grieving is to adjust to a new environment. What does it mean to be the church, when we cannot gather together in this place and share holy communion? The newspaper headlines are speculating that Christmas could be cancelled this year. Well, it won’t be. But, yes, we won’t be able to mark it the way we have become accustomed to. We will need to adjust to a new reality. Likewise, we won’t be able to mark Remembrance Sunday as we have become used to. We can expend energy on outrage, or, we can choose to remember; perhaps, get back to the heart of remembrance, which is to move towards reconciliation and peace.

The fourth task of grieving is to reinvest in the reality of a new life. And right now, to be honest, we might not have the energy to do so. One of my deepest regrets of 2020 is that earlier in the year our church buildings were only closed for three months. You see, across the country, we just buckled down to ride it out until we could return to business as usual. But there is no going back, only pressing onward.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. What does that look like? Well, in part, it looks like holding on to the hope that there will be a reckoning beyond this life, beyond what we see now, when God will wipe away every tear. But what about the present? For now, the Church is called to be a foretaste of that hope, a testimony to what—and who—we hope in. We are called to be those who comfort the mourning; and those who, in our own mourning, know ourselves to be blessed, to be the happy ones. What does it look like? It looks like participation in the tasks of grieving, the conspiracy between the circumstances of our lives and the God who loves us beyond measure to draw us ever deeper into the mystery of knowing life in its fullness, its richness.

If All Saints’ Day reminds us of anything, it is that we have a long history of doing this. This might be the first pandemic you and I have lived through, but it is not the first time that the Church has been here. As we look to the men, women, and children whose faithful lives inspire our own, we are challenged and invited to step up and do likewise.

So, our doors will shut, and what we will be won’t look like what it has done, on the outside. But now is a time to press into our identity as children of God, to purify ourselves, that just a glimpse of what we hope in might be seen by those around us. That, as we say in Durham Diocese, we might bless our communities, for the transformation of us all.