All Saints Day

The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs by Fra Angelico

Rejoice in God’s saints, today and all days;
A world without saints forgets how to praise.
In loving, in living, they prove it is true:
The way of self-giving, Lord, leads us to you.

Final verse of “Rejoice in God’s Saints,” words by Fred Pratt Green

This has been a tough week. I cried in front of several friends yesterday at my daughters’ soccer games. I’ll spare you the details, but someone has been unkind to our family repeatedly and we are tired of it. This too shall pass. 

Because of that, I have found myself pretty pre-occupied and unfortunately not fully present more times than I would like to be. It is a habit that I know the Lord longs to free me of but I have more time on that path, I’m afraid. The process of sanctification is indeed a process.

With all of this pre-occupation, I forgot that today is All Saints Day where the church recognizes and celebrates the good news of the gospel by remembering those who have journeyed through life well and are enjoying eternal rest with God. Our parish has a beautiful, and risky, tradition of having an open mic for people to share brief testimonies of a saint’s influence on our lives. 

The processional hymn was a new one to me but the words are over a hundred years old. During the final verse, I was cycling through well-recognized saints who have done great things for God and thinking about their influence in my life. For context, I’m pretty Catholic in my reverence for the saints but pretty Protestant in my list of saints (i.e. all those in Christ are already saints, but I digress). 

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and I would be shortsighted to not learn from the lives of saints who have followed Christ throughout history, in times very much like ours and also very different. I also want my children to look up to the saints as examples of faith instead of settling for flash-in-the-pan influencers who are talented but lack the character formed by a lifelong faithful witness. So, I revere the saints and join them in praising God somehow caught up in the beauty and mystery of the gospel. 

So when it was announced in worship that we would be invited to come share about a saint who has influenced us as our proclamation of the gospel today, I quickly thought about a few people who seemed inextricably linked: My grandparents and Fr. Calin. 

My four grandparents were all faithful Christians, belonging to the Church of Christ tradition. They all devoted themselves to following the way of Jesus, as best they could. My maternal grandpa was a lifelong preacher and my paternal grandfather, who passed before I was born, was an elder. My grandma and grandmother did not get the titles but their faithful witness is every bit as much of an influence for the gospel as their husbands. So much of who I am today is directly linked to the soil that these four people tilled in the faith – and for that, I could not adequately express my gratitude.

Then I thought of Fr. Calin, who unexpectedly passed away last month. Fr. Calin was a Byzantine-rite Catholic priest, faithful husband, father of four, and Director of Spiritual Care at Saint Thomas Hospital. I met him at a time of vocational distress and he was incredibly kind, generous, and encouraging. He told me all about the world of Ministry Formation in Catholic healthcare and said I should apply for the job, nevermind that I was not Roman Catholic. We would go on to have many more cups of coffee in his office as we worked together. He loved and followed Jesus but his world of Christianity was pretty different from the one that I grew up in, but I know we both sharpened and encouraged each other. Worshiping with the Divine Liturgy with his parish was one of the most memorable worship services that I have ever been a part of, it felt like we had left earth and were in heaven – which is kind of the point. He was a good man. I had a lot more to learn from him and I regularly joked with him that there aren’t too many married priests who homeschool their children. He understandably didn’t want his kids to go to a traditional Catholic school and talk about their dad being a priest :).

So I sat there in worship this morning thinking about this Eastern Catholic priest and my Church of Christ preacher grandpa. Their parish and congregation could not look more different – even though both of them worshipped Jesus, served faithfully, and bore witness to the gospel. Now I think about them joining together to celebrate at Christ’s table, joining all the saints throughout history from every tribe, tongue, and nation. And I am overwhelmed by the goodness of God, his compassion on us and our limited understandings of the gospel – and I look forward to the day when we will fully experience the depth of the gospel as we attempt to bear witness to it now. 

Go be faithful and give glory to God in whatever you do. Know that a life well lived will be remembered more than anything else we accomplish or collect. Look to the saints when you are wondering if anyone else has gone through difficult times or if anyone else has been faithful as God as pruned his church through challenging times. After all, all the saints will point you to Christ.