Anglican Church of Canada
All Souls Day, November 2, 2015
“ …how they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill , taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us—and through them we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too. Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I assume—”increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,” says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving “from strength to strength,” which sounds like business enough for anybody— and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things…” – from The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner
This reflection from the spiritual writer Frederick Buechner has a lot in it. I propose that we unpack it, phrase by phrase, to see what it can teach us about death, and grief, and remembrance, and hope, and the communion of saints.
. . . although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us.
We begin with an acknowledgement that death is real: “death can put an end to them right enough”. We cannot deny the pain of loss. That is one thing that brings us here this evening, the sorrow of grief: the sorrow that hangs over all human life, the sorrow we feel each of us in quite sharp, personal, particular ways.
What then is this memory we cherish of the departed? What does it mean, what is it good for? Well, we remember them because we cannot do otherwise, and we wouldn’t want to. Memory is an act of love. It comes from the fact that our lives are intertwined with theirs, and so our relationship continues. They are part of us.
Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether . . .
Memory is not just a looking back, not just a vain rehearsing of what is past, and so is eternally separated from us. It is “a looking out into another kind of time altogether”. This time is what the tradition calls eternity.
Now when we think of eternity, we think about it just the way we think about time on earth. There is really no other way we can think about it, because our minds are shaped to understand things in terms of time. And so eternity passes just the way time on earth passes, it just goes on and on. “When we’ve been there ten thousand years . . .”
But perhaps eternity is really a different kind of time altogether. It is time as experienced from God’s perspective. God does not exist inside time, like we do. Rather, time is God’s creation, and so God exists outside of time altogether, equally present to all points in time, past, present and future.
If the dead are with God, as we believe – for in love God holds all creation in his heart – then they have entered into this other time.
Again, we tend to think of them as existing alongside of us in time, just in another place. But perhaps the more accurate image is to think of them as being in another time: in God’s time, God’s eternity, which works in ways we cannot begin to understand.
. . . where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill , taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us—and through them we come to understand ourselves—in new ways too. Where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.
In God, eternity is not dead or petrified, frozen in time where all things are eternally unchanged. God’s eternity is characterized by God’s own being as Trinity, by the eternal dance of love and relationship within God, and overflowing into creation. It is an eternity of motion, of relationship, of growth. Our saints who have gone before are caught up in the eternal growth of God. And so they are not unchanged, not for all time frozen into the image of what they once were. They continue to grow, to grow in sanctification, to grow into who they are meant to be – “‘increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,’ says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving ‘from strength to strength,’ which sounds like business enough for anybody”.
Who knows what “the communion of saints” means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us.
And so they are not ghosts, not simply empty memories of who they once were for us. They are alive in God’s presence, in God’s time, in the eternal relationship of love that is God’s very person and God’s self-giving to creation. They are now completely in touch with “the power and richness of life itself”, they are immersed in the creative stream of God’s love.
That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things…
And so our act of remembering them, remembering them with love, with sorrow, but also with hope, is not just nostalgia, not just a conjuring up of ghosts long past. It is an act of reaching out to them as a living reality, to connect with them and with the living stream of love that they are part of. From our side, it is an act of protest and resistance, an act of defiance against the iron power of death that seems so absolute and merciless from where we are standing. Our memories are prayers tossed out into the darkness. But from the perspective of the other side, our acts of remembering our saints in love connect us with the fullness of life they share, connect us with the growth and sanctification and relationship by which they are being perfected as the creatures they were meant to be. And so we too find a communion with them that will continue to change our lives, continue to strengthen and inspire us, continue to let our courage and trust and love grow.
It is not simply a turn of phrase to say that our loving remembrance of the faithful departed in a religious act. It is an act that binds us more fully with the source of all life, and draws us into that eternal communion that is the very being of God, and which our loved ones share in now.