Of All the Saints

I have a friend who lives in Atlanta. He grew up in Decatur Alabama, and was my roommate for two years in college. During my years in college I spent a good deal of time with his family since Decatur wasn’t that far from Sewanee. His father was an Opthamologist. He was the son of a Baptist minister. His mother was just lovely, her father a Baptist minister as well. She always warmly welcomed me; she was quiet but elegant; she played the piano as if she meant it; she was kind to everyone she met. During our sophomore year my roommate’s younger brother went missing…the word was that he had moved to California and joined a cult (for some reason cults abounded in the seventies it seems). For several years they never knew his whereabouts, until finally they learned of his death, an overdose in a squalid tenement building in Los Angeles. Gay, my roommate’s mother, wore outwardly and visibly on her elegant frame her grief for her son, over the years he was missing and at his death; a suffering servant. She died suddenly a few years after her son’s death in her early fifties. Despite my grief I could only give thanks for her rest.

We drove to Decatur for her funeral which was to be led by her brother, a Baptist minister. The snob in me dreaded the homily; but to my utter surprise the homily was beautiful and appropriate and brought most of us to tears. During the service on a cold gray day, a light and delicate snow fell. The homilist said that all of us are windows onto who God is, and that Gay was one such gracious window. I’ve never forgotten that day; taught about living a sacramental life by a Baptist preacher from Laurel Mississippi. God is full of surprises.

He didn’t use the word saint, but that is what he meant. We have in the Episcopal Church a book entitled Holy Men and Holy Women. It contains biographies of our “official” saints and suggested readings for their particular feast day over the course of a year. Our saints in order to be added to the calendar must be approved by two consecutive General Conventions. What separates them from us? Why are they set apart from the rest of us? The answer is nothing. There is no doubt that they were ordinary people just like us, with gifts and imperfections. But having said that, it is important to name people who we witness serving the cause of God’s commonweal, their imperfections notwithstanding. It is as if we have an innate need as spiritual beings to open windows, as it were, onto who God is by observing the lives of those come before us who lived at their core for the greater good.

And not only windows, these saints of God, but also mirrors….mirrors by which we see our own sainthood, our own potential for serving the good and the right, our imperfections notwithstanding as well. This Sunday, the Sunday following All Saints Day, our namesake, we will celebrate all the saints of God, the dead and the living and the ones yet to come. Rejoice and be glad in the certain knowledge that you are in that number.