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."

all souls

Tonight I could have watched some of my favorite comic book characters combine forces to achieve a victory over Death. It was the kind of arena-rock scale movie that requires big gestures, broad humor, and lots of noise. 

Instead I went to a requiem mass for all faithful departed, at my local Episcopal church. There were production values there too. Cordial neighbors, marvelous music, beautiful art, lovely building; in the midst of it was a man raising a piece of bread and saying, "This is my body."

And so in the midst of a remembrance of death, of a death in particular, came the gift of life.

As long as we have the story, the bread and wine, the water and oil, each other and the Spirit, we will be all right. 

(Herb O'Driscoll said that; he was right.)

In the midst of a celebration of death, a remembrance of the dead, and a solemn liturgy, a simple gesture reminded us: that in that very moment of perishing, of emptying out, of offering his very substance of life, the Christ Jesus did achieve a victory over death - a victory that was final. And has yet to be completed. As we have yet to be complete. For we are part of that victory. 

Not by bombast or melody, not by might or mousy self-erasure, but by a simple act of substance: a giving of ourselves commensurate with that victory: total.



And in the midst of it, amidst well-meaning neighbors and uncomfortable feelings breaking me out of the spell of the liturgy, I remembered my mother, who died this past August, reciting for me in June something surprising, a poem she must have learned as a little girl. It was a private smile to share amid the tragic solemnities:

Bean soup
tastes so bad
it makes me mad
when Mother gives
such stuff to me;

But when I pour it 
on the floor
I am as happy 
as can be.

When Mother spanks
I give her thanks 
for I know
'tis good for me.

Thanks, Mom.

 

All Souls' Day Mass and Reception 

The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, also known as All Soul's Day, is this upcoming Thursday, November 2nd. At 7:00pm we will hold a Requiem Mass in memory of all those who have died. You can submit names of loved ones you would like to have remembered at this service by emailing Kelli at k.d.joyce@stphilipstucson.org by Wednesday, November 1st. The Saint Philip's Staff Singers and the Canterbury Choir will perform Requiem for My Friend by Zbignew Preisner and In Paradisum by Eriks Esenvald, in what will be the Southern Arizona premiere for both works. Following the Eucharist there will be a reception hosted by the Parish Life Committee in the Perry Garden. Please don't miss this wonderful and moving service!  -- from the parish news, Saint Philip's in the Hills, October 26, 2017.

Remembering 5A

For some reason today as I think ahead to All Saints and All Faithful Departed (All Souls) observances later this week, what came to mind was my joy at seeing Eugene and his partner Frank years after I met them in the summer of 1977. Back then I was the 'file boy' as my neighbor Lamar Spencer so kindly put it, a GS-2 clerk-typist at the US Environmental Protection Agency Region Nine headquarters, in downtown San Francisco, at 100 California Street. Years later, after the AIDS epidemic had peaked, I saw them at a party - and was overjoyed. For years I had wondered if they survived, and there they were, and together.

In the meantime I had worked with the Rev. Canon William (Bill) Barcus, who served as the AIDS spokesman for the Bishop of California as long as he could. The last time I saw Bill he waved valiantly to me, hands full of groceries, from the sidewalk in the Castro, along upper Market Street, as I drove by.

And later I tried volunteering at San Francisco General Hospital, Ward 5A, which by then had taken over as the principal treatment center for AIDS patients.

This was well before the disease was fully understood and before more effective and affordable treatments became available.

What I remembered this morning was not the where or what - but the sudden sense of the loss of a whole generation of young men. Loss, and grief, and sorrow.

And some gratitude at their valiant hope - for others if not themselves - and patience.

And the love of others for those who suffered and whom we have lost.

Robert, Andy...


http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/csf/sfpl/aidsward.pdf