M-25 Isn’t that much different from so many others like it.  I used to drive the Jarrettsville Pike regularly and there was always a little shrine somewhere along the way.  They are there because someone loved someone who breathed their last on the side of that highway.  They place markers to tell the rest of us “this was someone who mattered” to me and to us and we will not forget. Cemetery markers do the same thing.  If you wander through the cemetery at Springfield Presbyterian Church in Sykesville you will see evidence of generations of Warfields whose lives mattered to us and to others.  At the Richland Presbyterian Church in South Carolina there are scores of Doyles scattered through and every one of them mattered. As body’s return to the earth from which we came, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we affirm that all,  as today’s Scripture reminded us, are not just memories but children of God as are those remembered by flickering candles in the chancel.

But that is where we often stop.  Many stop with the memory that we carry with us and the visible symbols that we create because these things we can explain and control.  And we like to be able to explain things.  Everything else that we try to say about these things resides in the realm of faith and mystery…our words and symbols rarely up to the task of bridging the gap between the mystery of life that we sometimes can glimpse and the categories that define the life we know.  So for some the shrine, or the gravestone, or the memory are all that connect them to that life that mattered.  Whatever questions are left for them are confined to personal internal speculation and such grief can be unbearably lonely.
But here we come together in community.  Here we go beyond the individual memories and the personal shrines and markers.  Whether our grief is still raw or something that has been smoothed over through the years, here the church speaks to us with an ancient voice resonant with deep eternal truths of life and connections that weave across and beyond the boundaries created by time and by space.  Sometimes we experience these connections in surprising ways, even in this life.  We seek to follow Jesus, the Christ of God who was among other things a boundary crosser.  What the church says is that physical death is not the end of life…that the boundaries that we perceive as so rigid are of little consequence in the realm of the infinite and the eternal.   The testimony of the church is that as we live we are not alone…not isolated in time and space but surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who once upon a time and even upon THIS time, continue guide and challenge us in ways we can never know…somehow continuing to encourage us to live with the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.  The church recognizes that our minds and our senses are finite.  So it doesn’t try to explain the mystery.  But through the lives and experiences of those from every time and place who caught glimpses of a reality beyond us, Through them and with them the church stands as a witness to the mystery of love, and grace and life that is deeper and broader than time and space and mere memory.

A friend told me that after her daughter died she found that what she needed most and wanted most was not easy answers.  She wanted the ritual of the church.  It wasn’t the sermons that some of us feel compelled to blather on a weekly basis that drew her in.  It wasn’t the innovations or the new and improved theology or even the community.  It was the ancient rituals and symbols that point beyond themselves that are portals to the holy and the eternal. That, she said, was what she needed.    The church is at its best, I think, when we don’t try to explain it all but allow ourselves to be caught up in the contemplation of what might otherwise seem impossible…that time and eternity are a seamless web and that the candles that flicker today are more than temporary little shrines to honor a memory.   They are testaments to the church’s conviction that in life and in death we belong to God.  And if all is held together in God then there are unseen but very real forces at work that keep us connected, not only to all those who have gone before us or to those present in time with us but even to those yet unborn.
The hymn that we sing at every All Saints observance, “For All the Saints,”  says it simply and well in the third verse.  It is an old hymn, and perhaps uses some images we wouldn’t use now.  Yet, it arises out of the church….the guardian of Holy mystery.  In the third verse which maybe you never paid attention to before, the word’s are stretched toward the inexpressible, reminding us of a deep truth:    “oh blessed communion, fellowship divine, we feebly struggle, they in glory shine YET ALL ARE ONE in Thee for all are thine…Alleluia, Alleluia.  Amen.

Mary Gaut

All Rights Reserved