For All the Saints

 For All the Saints

As we approach the weekend of All Hallows Eve (October 31), and the following weekend when many of us remember All Saints, I have been remembering a couple of visits I made long ago, and a couple even longer.

When I was in college my advisor Donald Nicholl was newly arrived back from England. In fact, when I first went to see him in his office, his books had not arrived. The shelves were bare, but the walls were not. On them he had fixed pictures, perhaps just photocopies, of people he called his “friends” - or we might call saints. 

They appear later between the pages of his book Holiness (Darton, Longman + Todd) and we certainly heard about them in his classes on holiness in world religions. They were an eclectic bunch: Ramana Maharshi, Thomas Merton, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, …Living and dead, they were people he lived with intimately, in the spirit. So he called them his friends.

Years later after his death I went to visit his widow. Together we visited his grave. And I slept in the spare room, which had been his study before his death. Around him as he lay on the daybed had been those same friends, those saints, taped to those walls. They had traveled with him. 

And now Dorothy had put up her own wall of saints. Some different, some the same. An old friend, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and others. It makes me think: who would I put on my wall of saints? 

Longer ago was my Memorial Day visit with my great aunt to the cemetery in Colma, California: no, not the one where Wyatt Earp and Josephine are buried; the one next door with the bishops. As we stood there by the family monument with only a surname carved on the stone, Aunt Carol pointed out where various family members had been laid to rest in the ground around us, now covered with grass. I jumped when she pointed out I was standing on my great great cousin. I suppose there is a place there now for her, too. And she would appreciate the visit to the place.

For other relatives of my own generation there are a couple of beaches to visit in California, to remember places they loved best, before they were lost to the tide that sweeps away us all.

But this coming month I will remember them as they were, and perhaps I will put up my own wall of saints, with them among them.

JRL+

Oct 20, 2021

A version of this essay was published in the Keeping the Faith feature in the Home + Llife section of the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday October 31st 2021, page E3, under the title, "Remembering our own saints."