All Saints
What happened to you on All Hallow’s Eve? Were you assailed by ghosts and goblins? Did you encounter Dracula on your doorstep? Or did the Undead disturb you as you slept in your armchair in front of the fire?
We are fascinated by the macabre, aren’t we? Just think of all the literature which has to do with the occult, the fantastic, even science fiction falls into this. The gothic horror novel and the films from the Hammer Film Studios all testify to our appetite for the bizarre. We can not keep our attention away from the boundaries of our everyday lives. Over that boundary lies the very real unknown because it threatens the world in which we live. Over that boundary lies what cannot harm us.
But is that really the case? The Church Universal accepts that the boundaries of our everyday world can be breached, we can be assailed by horror and we can succomb to such attacks of the unfamiliar as horror stories, murder mysteries and the like tell us about. Even in our everyday lives we have come to accept that our world is very fragile. We need only think about September 11 last year on the world scale, and on the personal scale we need only think about the loss of a beloved friend – whether that is death or just moving away need not matter. The fact remains that our world can crumble so very easily.
But is it necessary that our world crumble? Do we have to fall prey to inconstancy, whim, delusion, or any other forces in the ever-changing, everyday world in which we must live and move and have our being?
Isn’t there something that is constant which keeps our world firm, and keeps us firmly in that world? “Yes! Of course there is!” You wouldn’t expect me to say anything else, would you? But what that ground of our lives is — well, there we might disagree. One might say the love of God, another might say the power of goodness, another could say faith in Christ, someone else might say self-sufficiency.
Whatever we say that Aristotelian “final cause” is, that is the rock of our salvation. The rock on which the whole of our lives is founded. As a preacher licensed in the Diocese of Gloucester, I am bound to say that the Church will help us understand that rock as no other institution can. As a preacher licensed in the Diocese of Gloucester, I am glad to say that the Church is a reflection of the Kingdom in which there are many mansions where we can find a home. Within the Church we are free to explore the meaning of Christ for ourselves here and now. So it is possible for each of us to move from one to another home in the course of our journey in this glorious Kingdom.
What does this all have to do with Hallowe’en? The evening before All Saints Day is when the secular world celebrates the other side, the other side of the boundaries of our well-ordered world, when the secular world acknowledges that there is something that threatens the whole of their lives. They send out their children to plague the world in which they live with images of the other side as they imagine it. The secular world are happy to give over to one night all of their desperate hopes and fears of the regions beyond their boundaries, the region which is out of their control.
I must say quickly that this description of Hallowe’en holds if the cycle of time is based on the year. There are some whose cycles do not run in a common time scale. These mad people may have a cycle of six months, one month, a week, or even a day. That evening of madness, when the dark images emerge from the mind, is one which allows people to have control over the rest of the year in some way. They have freed themselves of the terrors which are beyond the boundaries of their own lives by living it out through the ritual of Trick or Treat.
The christian must learn from the secular in their celebration of the evening before All Saints. We must understand that the fear outside the Church are the same as our fears within the Church. We, too, are worried about what is beyond the boundaries of our very ordered lives, lives where the line is drawn by our experience of Christ our Saviour. We try to use All Hallows’ Eve as a time of preparation for this most significant day in the church’s calendar.
The secular world does not look at the next day as a day of hope. The next day, All Saints’ Day, is merely another day in which they lose themselves in the workaday world where there is no significance to anything. We, on the other hand, since we look to the future of the kingdom where the saints dwell in glory, see inspiration in the lives of the saints, saints without number it seems, especially when one considers so many people that are locally considered saints. How often have you heard it said, “Oh, she is a saint!”?
Those local saints may not be like the ancient or modern martyrs, who gave up their lives as they clung to their faith in the risen Lord, like those gathered without number whom John the Divine looked upon in his vision, whose dazzling white garments were washed by the blood of the lamb, the lamb sacrificed on our behalf, for our salvation. But the local saints can give us all hope, like the hope the ancient and modern saints recognised in the calendar can give.
The Golden Legend, that wonderful collection of stories of the saints, talks about the Feast of All Saints in just this manner. All Saints’ Day supplies a day during the year when we can remember the saints who do not have their own day. After all, the church is full of the saints, just as when Paul wrote his letters. We must remember them all somehow. Perhaps that is why we have All Souls’ Day with All Saints’ – so that no one will be forgotten in the memory of the church and those who have survived them. We will remember whether there are saints or not, and as a preacher said one time a while ago, “You cannot always tell who they are, because they may be the most cantankerous in the congregation.”
To conclude let us hear what Augustine says, the saints are to be venerated because in their lifetime the Holy Spirit enlivened them for the accomplishment of every good work. I think this is what should inform our understanding of All Saint’s Day and our preparations for it.