All things made new
All Saints’ Day, October 31, 2021
Isaiah 25:6-9 • Revelation 21:1-6a • John 11:32-44
Today being October 31st, we find ourselves on the Eve of All Hallows’, All Hallows otherwise being known as All Saints, which is itself the day before All Souls Day on November 2nd. A triumvirate of naming and remembering those who have walked this earth, and walk it no more. A calling to the souls that we have loved and lost.
And we have so many to remember this year. When I asked for the names to be spoken into this holy space this morning, the names just flooded in. While many of these are losses that we still grieve from the past, most are from the last two years. Losses that are fresh wounds. Losses disrupted by the pandemic. A global catastrophe that prevented us from spending last days with loved ones and violated our intrinsic need to hold and say goodbye. A pandemic that left us with few opportunities for healing, where stories are shared and meaning can be sought.
And while we generally associate grief with personal loss. With over 550,000 known deaths in the US, and over five million known deaths in the world, the planet itself is heaving in grief. A grief that is so endemic that it is ambiguous, felt more as a shroud or a sheet ‘spread over all nations’. So many souls, ‘who have walked this way unheralded and numbered but known to God, their beginning and their end, their joy in life’, to quote from this morning’s opening collect.
We are a people in need of comfort and healing. So many of us with aching hearts from fresh loss. All of us weighed down by an untethered sense of loss. A feeling of somehow being adrift without knowing quite why.
And what a beautiful opportunity these three days of remembering and naming out aloud offer us. An opportunity to hallow, to remember and name the holiness. To rest in that sacred place of love and connection.
Because that is what it’s all about, isn’t it, love and connection? If there were no love and connection, we wouldn’t grieve. We are created capable of forming deep relationships, and indeed needing to form these loving bonds so as to live fully. All of Jesus’ teaching and healing was directed towards bringing people back into healthy, right relationship with each other. We need each other. We need to gather together with no- one left out. I love Isaiah’s magnificent vision of the glorious feast prepared for all peoples, where everyone has a seat and belongs. And that beautiful line that also appears in our second reading from Revelations, ‘God will wipe away the tears from all faces.’
That is exactly what we need. But, how to find it?
I think this is where we need to lean into our hope. Our hope, as the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, wrote, that ‘All will be well. All manner of things will be well.’ Hope that as Emily Dickenson writes, ‘is the thing with many feathers.’ I came across another reference to hope from 700 BCE in the translated words of the Greek poet Hesiod. In his poem ‘Works and Days’, he has a section talking about Pandora’s box, which if you remember is opened, allowing evils of all kinds to fly out into the world. But he writes: ‘Hope stayed behind in her impregnable home beneath the lip of the jar’. Hope won’t fly away. Hope is sticky, and, despite its seeming fragility, is tough and tenacious.
And where is our hope? Our hope lies, often just out of sight but always present, in every heart connection that we have: with all living things, and with the world itself. Every time we open our heart in recognition of something outside of ourselves, we take a breath filled with hope.
Our Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus, starts from a place seemingly without hope. And yet, Jesus calls him out of the tomb, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ Lazarus, come back into relationship with the world! And Lazarus indeed comes back into his circle of family and friends. He is unbound and let go.
Grief lives in a very holy place within us. Love and grief weaving themselves together with threads of sweet memory tangling with the violence of loss. And, be in no doubt, tangled within those threads, lie also the feathered, tenacious threads of hope.
All of us are grieving to greater or lesser extents in these pandemic days. For our healing, we need to be gentle with ourselves and each other. If we find ourselves stuck in any ‘starless graves’, let’s choose to step back into this beautiful world. Let us reach out and unbind each other; helping each other recognize the gifts of holiness and hope in the depth of our feelings.
Let us tell each other the stories of our loss and grief, allowing the narrative of love with all of its precious memories, be our Balm of Gilead, leading us to that place of hallowing, of holiness, where, as we are promised, our tears will be wiped from our eyes, and all things will be made new.