Today is All Saints' Day. Here's a handful of quotes and images to consider as you mark this sacred feast that we'll celebrate together on Sunday.
"For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,' 'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves."
- Joan D. Chittister in A Passion for Life
"Some people are your relatives, others are your ancestors and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors." - Ralph Ellison
"On these "thin days," as the ancient Celts called them, All Saints Day and All Souls Day (Nov. 2), we are invited to be aware of deep time when past, present, and future time all come together as one. On these pivotal days we are reminded that our ancestors are still in us and work with us and through us. Protestants thought it was about "worshiping" saints, but that largely missed the point.
Actually this is a Christian meaning for reincarnation, which Christians also called "the communion of saints" in the Apostle's Creed. This was the common and corporate notion of the human person. It realized that our ancestors are indeed in us and with us (as modern DNA studies can now prove), and then early Christianity added maybe even for us! We were quite foolish to make fun of many Native and Eastern religions, which we dismissed as "mere ancestor worship" who usually had the more corporate notion of personhood, far removed from the myth of modern individualism. All Saints Day is a celebration of all of us precisely in our togetherness, which is why the New Testament (in twenty places!) called all God lovers "the saints."" - Richard Rohr
"As we grow older we have more and more people to remember, people who have died before us. It is very important to remember those who have loved us and those we have loved. Remembering them means letting their spirits inspire us in our daily lives. They can become part of our spiritual communities and gently help us as we make decisions on our journeys. Parents, spouses, children, and friends can become true spiritual companions after they have died. Sometimes they can become even more intimate to us after death than when they were with us in life.
Remembering the dead is choosing their ongoing companionship."
-Henri Nouwen
"Jesus uses everything-his scandalous birth, his struggle-filled wanderings,
his humiliating death on the cross--to bless the whole people of God. And
he asks God to use us all in exactly the same way. To make life out of death, children out of stones, prophets out of little girls, disciples out of cowards--saints out of human beings.
And so we celebrate the saints who have gone before, those who show, in
their whole imperfect lives, the promise of unboundaried life that God
makes incarnate in Christ Jesus. We name ourselves and each other as saints, too: as the people God has taken for his own, the people God blesses so that we can bless each other. " - Sara Miles
See you soon at Turk & Lyon.
