O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!
Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, also called “All Hallow’s Day.” This is the holiday from which Halloween gets its name since Hallow’e’en, or Hallow’s-evening, is the night before All Hallow’s Day. Hallow just means “holy person,” or saint.
Historical records show that some form of All Saints’ Day has been celebrated among Christians since the fourth century. Originally, it was meant to commemorate the lives of the martyrs, those people who died in service of their faith.
As Christianity spread throughout Europe, All Saints’ celebrations eventually made their way to the British Isles. It was there that the feast was moved to November First. By the ninth century, the Pope declared it a universal holiday, intended to commemorate the growing list of official saints in the church calendar.
Even after the Protestant Reformation and America’s independence from England, the Episcopal Church managed to keep All Saints’ Day in our calendar. But its theology has changed a little bit since the early days. Though we acknowledge many of the saints of the Catholic Church, our tradition doesn’t have a canonization process. Instead, we can make recommendations to a committee that votes on who should be remembered in our calendar…it’s rather bureaucratic.
But part of the reason we do it this way is because we have a broader definition of the saints than the sanctoral calendar might suggest. To be understood as a saint in our tradition, you don’t have to have performed a miracle or died as a martyr, you just have to be a person who tried to follow Jesus the best you knew how. That persistent faithfulness serves as encouragement for others walking the same road, and it is why the church finds it meaningful to remember people in our calendar.
But, the beauty of the whole thing is that anyone can be a saint…to someone. Saints are all around us. Whether named or unnamed, known or unknown, they stretch out in all directions, holding us in our suffering, affirming us in our struggle, blessing us with words of hope, and helping us experience the love of God that knows no bounds.
Our faith teaches us that this “communion of saints” is not merely a nice thought, but a mystical reality. The Body of Christ acts like a tether – holding all the saints together across time and distance, and even death. We are never alone.
As a kid, I was friends with a Catholic girl from Louisiana who always did her Hail Mary prayers before bed, even when she was sleeping over at my house:
Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
One time, when we were about 12 years old, I heard her whispering these prayers in the dark, and told her to stop. I earnestly believed, as my Protestant church had taught me, that you could only pray to Jesus. At best, praying to Mary was fruitless. At worst, it was idolatry.
Of course, I didn’t realize then that prayers like the Hail Mary are not prayed “to” the saints, but “with” them. They are prayers of intercession, not so different from the having an intercessor pray the Prayers of the People on our behalf. They are intended to invite the eternal and ever-present ancestors of our faith to advocate for us before Christ.
More than 20 years after that fateful sleepover, I found myself sitting alone in a hospital chapel in Slidell, Louisiana. I was out of tears, and out of words to pray.
I whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. Please…please.”
Only a few weeks earlier, I had accepted a two-year position at an Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas. I graduated from Yale Divinity School and went on a brief pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. Then Daniel (my husband, not the Old Testament prophet!) and I – along with my mother-in-law – packed up our apartment and our two cats to make the 26-hour drive to Texas.
Daniel hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks, and on moving day, he could barely stand up. Two days into our three-day trip, we were staying the night in Slidell, Louisiana, when he woke up in the middle of the night doubled over in pain. My mother-in-law and I rushed him to the little regional hospital.
After hours of waiting, the weary nurse looked at Daniel and said, “You are very sick.”
The surgeon said he would have to have risky surgery with a long recovery time. We were terrified (much like the Old Testament prophet).
And there were other complications…Our Medicaid didn’t work in Louisiana. The hotel we were staying in was mildewed from Hurricane Ida. The cats were stir-crazy. And our past-due U-Haul was sitting in the parking lot.
Weary with many things, I started talking to Mary about three days into Daniel’s hospital stay: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. Please, please.”
Meanwhile, friends from all over the country were praying, too. A former associate priest from my sending parish had already sent the local priest to Daniel’s bedside. People were sending cash to help us with expenses. A parishioner and his father-in-law drove ten hours roundtrip to pick up our U-Haul and take it Houston. The rector of my new church met the movers to unpack my stuff. The Diocese figured out insurance.
The saints of God, both living and dead, were praying with us and acting on those prayers. They were holding us steady in the love of God.
Daniel asked the surgeon if we could “wait and see” on surgery. And in that little regional hospital, with no one else to attend to, the surgeon shrugged, and said “sure.”
A few days later, Daniel was healing. And after a week in Slidell, Louisiana, we were back on the road on our way to Texas.
I wasn’t expecting a miracle. I couldn’t find the words to pray for one. I had nothing left to say to God.
But, thank God, the saints were praying: My friend Joe in Maryland; Reverend Elaine in New Jersey; my dad Gary in Florida; and my new parishioner Vyonne in Houston; Mary, the mother of God, of course. And even Misty, the Catholic girl from Louisiana, who taught me about the saints when I was busy telling her she was wrong.
All the saints were holding us in that patchwork without end or beginning, bound in the love of God.
I can’t imagine what life would be like without all those saints. In fact, I can only imagine hope at all, because I have seen it with my own eyes, living and breathing in all the saints, made real by each person who simply tries to follow Jesus the best they know how.
On All Saints, we remember that, in Christ, the veil is always thin between the living and the dead. Across time and distance – and even death – the saints are always praying, moving, acting, and loving hope into the world.
The air is thick with the saints. I pray that you will have the courage to count yourself among them.
Leah Wise 