I was relistening to a podcast this week in which the interviewee, Francis Weller, a psychotherapist, writer, and expert in the healing work of grief ritual, made the comment that in his work he sees two ailments that especially seem to afflict people today: amnesia and anesthesia, that is, forgetfulness and numbness. The fraternal twins of the liturgical calendar, the feasts of All Saints and All Souls that we celebrate today and tomorrow are good antidotes respectively to our inclination, on the one hand, to forget, and on the other hand, to stay anesthetized.
I have favored the word remember for a long time and often spell it with a hyphen— re-member —to emphasize what is involved in remembrance. More than a mere mental recollection or act of nostalgia, to re-member ourselves to someone is to celebrate our unbreakable connection to them. Whether the other is alive or dead, to re-member someone is to assert that we belong one to another. It is not so much to be reminded of them as to be re-hearted to them by love or friendship or struggle or deep sympathy or compassion. Whether loved one or stranger, whether someone we knew personally or know now intimately or someone we have admired from afar, whether friend or foe, at its most profound level, to remember another is to recognize that “I am in you and you are in me.” We are members of each other.
The shema, the privileged prayer of Jews that is the centerpiece of morning and night prayer, re-members Jews both to God and to the core truth of their faith, namely, the Oneness of God: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” Found in Deuteronomy 6:4, the shema acknowledges not only that the pray-er belongs to God but that all that is dwells in God and is embraced by grace.
It stands to reason that if God is One, and if we all come from the One source and giver of life, then we all belong to one another. Everything and everyone is part of the Holy One, is part of each other, and is one in God who is whole and entire.
For Christians, the incarnation is not merely the reconciling mystery by which Jesus re-members us to God but rather the living reminder of our innate oneness in God. Jesus is the embodiment and channel of love by which God expresses the original, immediate, and eternal oneness we share with God by the gratuitousness of Divine love. Jesus is the living reminder both of our oneness in God and of the lavishness of God’s love that makes us and all creation one. It is the forgetfulness of this that wreaks havoc on us and our world.
Just as Jesus reminds us that we are one in God and belong one to another, so too the saints are those friends of God whose oneing love of the Divine re-members us
to the Holy One in whom we live and move and have our being,
to that which is truest and most noble in ourselves,
to one another in care, common humanity, and compassion, and
to the sacred community of the whole earth.
Humanity’s most grievous offense is arguably our refusal to act as if we belong to one another. We recall how Thomas Merton’s great epiphany upon beholding the people in the shopping district at the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville on a rare sojourn into the city from the monastery was not just the realization that he “loved all those people,” but also “that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” Merton goes on to describe his experience like “waking from a dream of separateness” that he admits was rooted in the illusion of “supposed holiness” that was commonly assumed to be inherent to the monastic life and “separation from the world.” His epiphany causes him to revel in “the sense of liberation from an illusory difference” and to rejoice in his share and membership in the human race. He writes, “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men (sic), that I am only a man among others. . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.”[i]
The communion of saints, which is so much bigger than we realize, is not a private club whose membership requires otherworldly piety, but rather a call, a charge, and a manifesto to live with the spiritual audacity, courage, and conviction that we are already one in God and belong to each other, and a mission to resist and work to remove all the little justifications, nefarious or cynical forces, and inhumane interactions that try to convince us otherwise.
The feast of All Saints is a time to remember those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith, those men and women whose lives are exemplary not because they are so different from us but because, being very much like us, they chose to maximize and exercise that which was most noble in their humanity. The saints are not angelic beings but folks just like us who practice not-so-random acts of kindness, hospitality, friendship, generosity, goodness, compassion, mercy, courage, and love. When Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, once overheard another Catholic worker describe her to a visitor as being a saint, she famously turned around and said, “You can’t dismiss me that easily.” She knew that such a misunderstood appellation tended to pedestalize people into the stratosphere, to remove holiness from serious consideration, and in so doing to provide others with an excuse not to live their lives by the same gospel principles of radical love.
We are well past the age when we should be perpetuating the fallacy that holiness is reserved for some spiritual elite who walk on water and don’t have clay feet. We are also well past the time when holiness should be mischaracterized as pious priggishness or the saint as some goody-two-shoes on steroids. Nothing could be further from the truth. The saint, above all, is the human person fully alive. Alive, not perfect. Sanctity has to do with genuine aliveness and shares nothing in common with the faux expressions of aliveness in our day: extroversion, Type A personality, ambition, worldly success, gregariousness, being driven or the life-of-the-party.
Jesus came to re-member us to God, to reveal to us what God is like, and to show and teach us what it means to be truly human. Saints are distinguished not by being godly but by being authentically and faithfully human. Paradoxically and tellingly, we most resemble God when we are most ourselves. The saint is the one who knows that to be truly holy is to be deeply human and that to be truly human is to be deeply holy. Transposing the life of Christ into the daily realities of their life and times, the saints also show us what God is like and reveal to us what it looks like to be more not less human. Holiness is not about perfectionism, getting it right, ritual purity, or living an error-free life. Holiness is about aliveness and aliveness is all about love. The more we incarnate love the more we become our truest self, the more human and holy we become, and the more we become who God created us to be.
The saint is not the extraordinary doing the extraordinary ordinarily. The saint is the ordinary doing the ordinary extraordinarily. That is, the saint does what she does with love for the sake of love— the kind word, the simple loving gesture, the unseen holy deed, the quotidian obligations fulfilled, the gifts of listening, the sacrament of presence, the tiny acts of care constantly repeated are offered in contribution to the effulgence of love. The saints among us are not typically the most noticeable, spectacular, or sensational. They are rarely the loudest, flashiest, or most remarkable by the standards of the dominant culture. The saints are simply (and not so simply) the man, woman, or child who dares to let love have its way with them, who dares to let love remove all the common excuses not to love. Humble of heart, the saints are clear that life is a gift to be lived in service to love and that love is not a Pollyannaish delusion but possible, credible, expected, transforming, and necessary if we are to help God’s dream come true on earth as it is in heaven.
In the church’s wisdom, the Gospel reading for the feast of All Saints is the Beatitudes as recorded in Matthew’s gospel. Here we have laid out before us Jesus’ eightfold path by which the lives of the friends of God—the saints—have been fired and guided for millennia: to be poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to be a peacemaker, and to be persecuted for the sake of righteousness. The eight beatitudes that are the modus operandi of the saints fly in the face of the values of the dominant culture and are the core expressions of Christic love. With as many ways to be holy as there are ways to be human and ways to love, the saints remind us that they did not so much imitate Jesus as transpose the vision, message, actions, and spirit of Jesus into their own time and place.
We re-member ourselves to the friends of God today, the living and the dead. We honor those who have inspired, encouraged, and challenged us to incarnate love. We show our reverence for and gratitude to them by committing ourselves daily to be servants of love each in our own unique way in the particular circumstances of our own lives. And we remember that whenever we re-member ourselves to one another in love, we participate in the liberating, healing, and transforming love of God and the communion of saints.
I close these thoughts with the words of the evangelist John: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. . . .Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another” (I John 4: 7,11).
Re-membering myself to you in friendship and love. djm
[i] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 156-57.