Saints
When we think about saints, most of us naturally recall people whose lives were extraordinary in some way. In the church: St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalene. In society: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu. In our families and communities: grandparents, neighbors, fellow parishioners.
Human beings like to categorize people. One person is a saint while another is a sinner. We separate people by their achievements, education, economic status, fame, skin color, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, political party, the neighborhood in which they live, etc., etc.
The paired feasts of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2) invite us to set aside these arbitrary divisions to see our common humanity. As we celebrate our link to the communion of saints, these feast days connect us to “the great multitude that no one can count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” who stand together before God in heaven (Revelation 7:9).
But even these inclusive feasts find a way to separate and categorize. As the Rev. Sam Portaro points out in his book, Brightest and Best, the collect (opening prayer) for All Souls’ Day is “tragically flawed.”
“We maintain in our creed that God has made everything that is, seen and unseen. But [in the collect] we pray to a God who is ‘the Maker and Redeemer of all believers.’ What happened to everyone else? … Now we pray only for the faithful departed; everyone else be damned — literally. We then ask that God ‘grant to the faithful departed the unsearchable benefits of the passion’ of Jesus. Only to the faithful departed? What happened to our confidence that at least one of the ‘unsearchable benefits of the passion’ is that the passion of Jesus is ‘the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 2:2)?”
How many times have I prayed this collect and not recognized the impact of the words I’ve said? Words which judge and divide, which separate the sheep from the goats, which do what God has not empowered us to do. We don’t get to decide who is righteous and who is not. We are called to break down barriers, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to form beloved community and to invite all people to experience the grace and mercy of God.
“The point which scripture seems consistently to make,” Portaro continues, “is that everything, and everyone, belongs to God always. Let our prayers this day be … for all souls, for all belong to God always. Neither prenatal circumstance nor posthumous judgment shall ever shake that faith. And thus believing, we may see the world and each other anew.”
