November 1 All Saints homily
As you may know, today the church celebrates the feast of All Saints.
Now I grew up Catholic, and I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to saints, we Catholics are a strange lot.
We have some interesting traditions associated with the saints:
For example, when something is lost, we pray to St. Anthony and say some version of: Tony Tony look around. Something’s lost and can’t be found.
Or when you want to sell your house you bury a small statue of St. Joseph in your back yard upside down. (Bury him 12 inches deep, facing the road)
The church also went wild with assigning “patron” saints to things, and I mean everything.
Saint Barbara: Patron Saint of Fireworks.
Saint Charles Borromeo: Patron Saint of Dieting
Saint Drogo: Patron Saint of Unattractive People.
Saint Polycarp of Smyrna: Patron Saint Against Dysentery and Earaches (other parts are covered by other saints like St. Blaise covers your throat, St. Servatius of Tongeren covers your feet, St. John of God covers the heart…).
And then Catholics developed the practice of collecting bits of saints’ bones and teeth after they died and putting these in cases assuming that they had special power.
At one level, these cultural practices brought some comfort and folksiness to the faith, but at another level, I think they helped to distort a vision of “the saints” that we desperately need to recover.
Many of you know that my wife Lynne and I have two adult kids, Jonah and Kateri. They’re twins. And they recently launched their own podcast called Twinvestigation on Soundcloud. In each episode, they pick a topic and explore it more deeply. In a recent episode they picked a Halloween/All Saints theme and talked about the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-wen). It means “summer’s end.”
At its core, the celebration of Samhain ritualized the end of the harvest season and shortened days. But it also acknowledged what ancient peoples called “thin days” when the visible and invisible worlds met. Days when the world of the living and the world of the dead seem to be very close to one another.
In many ways, the commercialization of Halloween has eclipsed the underlying richness of this time, yet our church tradition tries to help us stay mindful of thin days and ancestors.
Some of you may be familiar with the amazing pastor and theologian – Nadia Bolz-Weber who I will refer to a few times today – who says that “Apart from those who have fallen in combat, Americans tend to forget our ancestors…But in the church, we do the very odd thing of proclaiming that the dead are still a part of us…and are even an animating presence.”
At the health center where I work, there’s an amazing young woman named Serena who is interning with me as a social worker. Besides just being an open soul and wonderful human, Serena brings a different consciousness to the work she does. Serena grew up in Zambia in Africa, where they have strong traditions of speaking with and listening to ancestors. She rarely makes major decisions without consulting them somehow and they are a vital part of her daily life and work. In fact they are the reason that she became a social worker.
St. Paul in his letter to the Hebrews tells us that we are surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses” and if you talk to someone like Serena you’ll be convinced that he wasn’t just speaking in metaphor. He meant that we have access to all those who have gone before us and that we can draw upon their lives and experiences to assist us. And they actually want to assist us!
It’s probably not a coincidence that our modern era uses the term “the cloud” to describe the place where all the data is stored. “It’s stored in the cloud…” I don’t even know what that means, but I do know that I can access all kinds of information from anywhere in the world as long as I have the right connection. It’s the same with the ancestors – we can access the information from anywhere, but we need the right connection.
Now we don’t just wake up one day and say, “OK, ancestors, talk to me!”
Like any relationship, it takes intentional effort – especially if we haven’t done much of it, and it might even feel a little weird for some of us. But with practice, we can become more in tune with how the cloud of witnesses moves and speaks. And when I say ancestors, I don’t mean just our human ancestors – we have ancestors in the trees, rivers, plants and animals – and we are going to need to consult all of them if we’re going to survive what we’re going through now.
One practice that I have found helpful to connect with the cloud is reading about the lives of the saints.
Back in 1997, Robert Ellsberg wrote a beautiful book called All Saints which has been so useful and inspiring for me. In the book you get to read stories of people who are both recognized and unrecognized saints – people who are prophets and witnesses for our world. Many of them were just regular – people some who did extraordinary things, some who never were famous. During Lent of this year, I tried to read a story every day, and I swear I felt like a better person for doing it because I felt their courage, goodness and humanity jump out at me. Ellsberg reminds us that we are “formed by what we admire.” Taking in the example of our ancestors in the faith forms us to be more like them.
Yet I also look on my dresser each day and admire pictures of my grandparents, Regina and Wilfrid Boucher and Charlie and Theresa LaBadie. These were ordinary people who tried to love their families well, went through their share of difficult times and tried to follow their calling. Regina, Wilfrid, Charlie and Theresa all encourage me because – even in the face of hardship – they passed on legacies of compassion, humor, generosity, simplicity and gratitude.
These are some of the saints in my life.
When I was growing up, the saints were like superheroes with extraordinary powers that I could never achieve. People like St. Francis and Superman seemed to be in the same category and the saints were seen as people to be idealized rather than imitated.
Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who, ironically is in the process of being canonized a saint once said, “Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” She knew that once we put people in lofty categories, we can ease off on trying to develop the very same attributes in us.
At its core, the word saint means nothing more than one who is healed or made whole. Saints were not people who were perfect or better or holier than anyone else. They just kept letting their lives be illuminated by God until the light was all that you could see. Ellsberg says that none of them even really set out to be saints at all. They were just people who were trying to respond to the world around them in the ways that God was calling them.
Nadia Bolz-Weber uses the term “accidental saints” to describe all of us who stumble into this grace and wrote a wonderful book by that same name.
And she says that the very words we hear today from Jesus – traditionally known as the Sermon on the Mount – are God’s attempt to help us be saints.
Considering who Jesus hung out with, I can imagine that as he looked out over the crowd who had gathered, he saw quite an average and rag tag group of people. These were people who didn’t feel very special. People who had struggles. People who felt lonely and confused and forgotten. People on the margins.
I love what Fr. Jim says about saints and holy people. When you’re in their presence, they don’t show you how good they are, they show you how good you are.
And so this is what Jesus does. He tells this group of people how good they are and how blessed they are – in their mourning and their meekness, their poverty of spirit and hunger for justice. He tells them that God sees their beauty – even if the world can’t, and Jesus knows that it is especially when we don’t feel blessed, that we NEED a blessing. So he gives them one.
Modern psychology tells us what Jesus knew a long time ago – that when we feel our own blessing, we are more able to bless others. When we feel loved, we are more able to love others. And when we feel healed, we are more able to heal others. Jesus starts with this group and trusts that the circle will widen.
In a now famous litany called, “Blessed are the Agnostics,” Nadia Bolz-Weber adds a bunch of categories to the beatitudes we hear today and offers a series of new blessings that she imagines Jesus saying. Here are just a few:
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are those who “still aren’t over it yet.”
Blessed are those who no one else notices.
Blessed are the closeted.
Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented.
Blessed are the ones who never catch a break
Blessed are those who make terrible business decisions for the sake of people.
Blessed are the burned-out social workers, the overworked teachers and the pro bono case takers.
Blessed are the kids who step between the bullies and the weak.
It’s no secret that difficult days continue to lie ahead of us. We had another fatal police shooting of a Black man named Walter Wallace in Philly this week, political tensions are high as the election looms, coronavirus cases continue to rise and there’s a lot of social unrest and anxiety all around.
We are going to need the ancestors and a cloud of witnesses like never before and we are going to need to feel our own blessedness so that we continue to address the pain that is around us.
In the Twinvestigation episode that I mentioned earlier, my daughter Kateri tells the story of how we came to put lights in pumpkins at this time of year. Back in the day, after the communal celebration of Samhain, each household would take an ember from the fire home in a carved out turnip in order to light the fire of their own hearth for the winter months. Pumpkins became easier to carve than turnips and the tradition evolved.
Today we are being invited grab our turnips and take home embers from the fire of our faith. Light up your homes and light up this world. Listen to the ancestors, and be the accidental saints that God calls us to be.
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