This Sunday we will celebrate the centennial of All Saints Parish, four to five generations of a people of faith who have gathered Sunday to Sunday at the corner of Government and Ann streets. The people of All Saints have experienced two world wars, economic depression, the invention of weapons of mass destruction, humankind’s venture into space, the invention of computer technology, immunization, movies and television, civil rights reform, the advent of feminism, birth control, the poetry of Eliot, Dickinson, Hughes and Stevens, the prose of Faulkner, Steinbeck, O’Connor, Morrison and McCarthy, the art of Wyeth, Warhol and O’Keeffe, the music of Barber, Gershwin, Ellington and Bernstein, the plays of Williams, O’Neil and Miller, presidents…hurricanes and lynchings and jubilees and kings and queens and balls and despair and joy and life and death and many seasons…change and the naming of change…the making and remaking of our world….the universe expanding.
And what of the next one hundred years? The effects of global warming, over population, new wars and rumors of wars, the decline and fall of nations, perhaps our own, new birth, and our own very deaths….the continued rubric of change and transformation…the continued making and remaking of the created order, which is no order at all but the blossoming forth of possibility and potential bearing the mystery of being on ahead…the potential of future borne in the present and past, hope its talisman….birth pangs and surprise and regret and joy…It shall be much the same and so utterly different.
What is our place in this grand procession of being? We are to point the way as best we see it; we are to name the truth of the matter as best we apprehend it; we are to enact the light of goodness that sets right exponentially this process of becoming. We are the people who have chosen and choose conscience; we are they who point to the way; the way of mercy and compassion and justice and peace: alchemical rudiments of transforming the leaden dispossession of our world into golden dignity, the commonweal of grace ordained in the beginning… And one more thing: We are to praise the God who inhabits this marvelous becoming…we are to sing the song of creation in both minor and major key; we are to prayerfully and passionately pay attention…at least for the next one hundred years…at the very least.
