All Saints Day
- Nov 4, 2015
- 11 min read
Revelation 21: 1-6a
John 11: 32-44
All Saints Day is a day when we remember all the saints of God:
known and unknown,
extraordinary and ordinary,
past and present.
Today, and tomorrow, All Souls Day,
are days when the barriers of time and death
that usually seem to separate us from those we love who have died
suddenly seem thin.
Times when life and death dwell close together.
When the living and the dead are somehow in one another’s presence.
We certainly get a sense of this from some of today’s readings.
In the Book of Revelation,
John has a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem,
the place where the saints who have died dwell.
And it’s not just someplace far away, up in the clouds.
It’s close.
It’s coming down out of heaven.
It’s not just “up there.”
It’s “down here.”
Among us.
And then there’s our Gospel story,
this story about Jesus raising Lazarus.
I can think of few stories in Gospels
where life and death dwell so closely together.
Where the barrier between them is so thin.
Where the living and the dead are so near.
When we hear stories like these today—
stories about heaven and earth meeting,
and dead men coming out of tombs—
they can seem a little otherworldly or fantastical.
I have to say, though, if I’m honest,
I’ve had experiences like this before.
Well, not of dead men coming out of tombs.
But experiences when the space between
the living and the dead seemed thin.
Maybe, if you’re honest, you’ve had experiences like this too.
You’re walking along,
going about your day, minding your own business…
When all of a sudden, you are reminded
of someone you loved who has died.
Maybe something you smelled reminded you of this person.
Or something you tasted.
Or maybe you heard a song on the radio that you always associated with them
or a hymn in church.
Or maybe you saw someone whose face
bore a striking resemblance to their face,
or who moved their hands like they moved their hands.
Whatever it was, all of a sudden,
it felt like this person whom you loved,
and who loved you was present to you in a very real way.
This actually happened to me a few weeks ago.
It was at the gym of all places.
It’s not exactly my favorite place in the world.
And it’s certainly not a place I expect to have a “moment.”
But anyway, there I was going about my business,
when all of a sudden I saw in the face of a woman in the weight room
the face of my friend Jeanette who died three years ago.
This woman in the weight room was a complete stranger.
I didn’t know her from Adam.
But there was something about her face that reminded me of Jeanette.
Maybe her eyes and nose and the way she held her lips together.
I’m not quite sure.
But whatever it was, in that moment, Jeanette was present to me.
She felt close.
Which was a great consolation
because I have missed her so much in the years since her death.
Jeanette was what you might call an “unlikely friend”.
I met her when I was thirteen and she was seventy-three.
There was sixty years in between us,
although this never seemed to matter much.
Growing up, I used to cut grass for people in my neighborhood,
mostly older women who lived alone.
Jeanette heard about me through the grape vine
and one day she called me up and said she’d like to give me a try.
The next day, I arrived at her place
with my little orange electric lawn mower.
It was practically an antique—
I’d inherited from my great aunt—
but it had always done the job.
Until now.
Soon after I started cutting Jeanette’s grass,
I realized that this wasn’t going to be a routine appointment,
nor was Jeanette going to be like my other customers.
Rather than go inside and leave me to my business like all the other nice old ladies,
Jeanette perched herself on the front step and watched my every move.
After cutting just two rows of grass,
I looked up and saw her waving her arms in the air.
“Stop,” she was yelling. “Stop right now.”
“Oh God,” I thought to myself.
“Your lawnmower is tearing up my lawn.
You can’t cut my grass with that thing!”
What was she talking about?
I cut grass for nearly a dozen other people
and no one else had ever complained about my lawnmower.
Who was this cranky old lady to tell me how to do my job?
I was tempted to tell her she had a lot of nerve,
and that she should find someone else to cut her grass
if she wanted it to look like a golf course.
But for some reason, I held my tongue.
And I listened to her advice.
And I went home and said,
“Mom, I think it’s time for me to get a new lawnmower.”
The next day, I turned up at Jeanette’s again—
with my brand new self-propelled gas mower in hand—
and cut her lawn to her exact specifications.
And from that day until the day I moved away to college,
I cut her grass every single week.
The hours that I spent at Jeanette’s house over the years
became more than a mere business transaction.
Much more.
Week after week, year after year,
I received from her the gift of an education.
And from one another, we received the gift of friendship.
Jeanette always slept late, so I could never arrive to cut her lawn before 1 o’clock in the afternoon.
When I did, however, and rang her doorbell—
or more often, banged on her door because she was hard of hearing—
she would appear, still in her bathrobe,
though always with bright red lipstick on.
Her home was modest,
though beautifully decorated with the art she’d collected from her travels.
She’d been a WAVE in the Second World War and had been around the world.
It was hard to imagine Jeanette being tied down by anything or anyone.
She never married or had children—
although she had been engaged once,
and kept the large, diamond ring after the wedding was called off.
Listening to her tell stories about her trips,
I became aware for the first time that the world was a lot bigger than my little hometown would have me believe.
On Saturday afternoons, Jeanette always had the opera on the radio.
She taught me to like opera.
She would reminisce about the days when she and her sister
had season tickets to the Met when they lived in New Jersey.
“God in heaven,” she would say.
“I love the opera.”
She loved cooking too, and she taught me to love cooking.
The end product, yes, but even more the process of cooking.
Of creating something.
She would happily spend all afternoon in the kitchen,
meticulously chopping vegetables for lentil stew,
or washing basil to make pesto,
or making matzo ball soup
or tapioca pudding to share.
And then there was what she taught me in her backyard garden.
About plants, but also about life.
Every week during the growing season,
she would take me out back and show me what had grown or bloomed.
In the spring, there were the tender sprouting herbs
she’d planted from seed in terracotta pots on her patio.
In the summertime, there were the purple coneflowers, the cosmos,
the hydrangea and the clematis climbing on her fence.
In the fall, there was the burning bush, bright red.
In the winter, she’d call me over to see the amaryllis blooming on her windowsill.
Nothing escaped her notice, not even the tiniest bud.
Nothing was too insignificant to bring her joy or wonder.
And she taught me to pay attention to these things too.
Not to miss a thing!
To be engaged with all of life.
Every moment is to be savored.
And speaking of being engaged with all of life,
Jeanette taught me about being politically engaged.
She was a passionate Democrat.
And although she promised she would love me no matter how I voted,
she never minced words about her own opinions.
While watching the evening news,
she was known to swear out loud
and if she got mad enough, even throw things
at the talking heads on her TV screen.
Jeanette showed me that it was ok to get angry sometimes.
She taught me that it was ok to speak my mind
and not to be afraid to stand up for myself or others
especially when justice was at stake.
One day, she found out that another customer of mine down the street,
Margie Clark,
wasn’t paying me enough.
So she rang her up and
told her she was a cheapskate who should pay me what I was owed.
The week after, Margie Clark did.
Jeanette also taught me a lot about God.
She was Jewish, although she hadn’t practiced since childhood.
In our chats about religion, she taught me—
in the South, a region of the country
not known for it’s open-mindedness on matters of religion—
that God must be infinitely more accepting of our differences than we could imagine.
“We’re all the children of the same God,” she must have said a thousand times.
“If I weren’t so damn old, I’d convert to your religion,” she would joke.
Over the years, through more encounters like these than I can count,
Jeanette came to love me and I her.
One day, she declared that she was adopting me as her grandson.
“I bet you never thought you’d have a Jewish grandmother, did you, sweetie?” she said.
Even when it came time for me to retire from cutting her lawn
when I moved away to college, we kept in touch, usually by email.
She would stay up into the wee hours of the morning on her computer.
Whenever I was home, I’d go by and visit her.
Every time I saw her, it seemed like she got smaller and smaller,
frailer and frailer.
And like the good Jewish grandmother she’d promised to be,
every time, she’d inquire about my prospects.
“Have you met any nice girls at college?” she’d ask.
“No,” I’d reply awkwardly,
wondering how I would ever tell her that there weren’t
ever going to be any “nice girls” in my life.
And then one day Jeanette got sick.
It was lung cancer.
Darn it.
It hardly seemed possible.
I mean, of course I knew she was old,
but I assumed she would always be around.
I think she assumed this too!
She’d always said she wanted to live to be a hundred.
But as much as she relished life and wanted to live longer,
her body began to wear out.
Not long before she died, I decided I wanted her to meet Michael, now my spouse.
I just couldn’t imagine these two people whom I loved so much not knowing one another.
So I sent her an email and told her that there was someone whom I really wanted her to meet.
A few weeks later, when we were home Christmastime,
Michael and I went over to her house.
We rang the doorbell, and after a few moments,
the door opened.
A tiny, stooped figure with a cane greeted us.
She was so thin, I barely recognized her, but it was Jeanette alright.
The bright red lipstick gave her away.
“Come on in sweetie,” she said.
We sat down, the three of us, on the couch, me in the center.
“Jeanette,” I said. “I’d like you to meet someone I’ve come to love very much. This is Michael.”
Taking note of Michael’s Mediterranean physique, she didn’t miss a beat:
“Oh sweetie, I’m so happy you’ve finally brought home a nice, Jewish boy…”
We laughed and laughed.
And Jeanette told us how happy she was that we had met
and how good-looking we were together.
And she told stories of the days when I used to cut her grass.
And we laughed some more.
And when it was time for us to go,
she hugged us both,
tightly,
for the last time,
and said goodbye.
Now every time I smell freshly mown grass
or hear an aria from La Traviata, I think her of her.
Every time I catch myself saying, “God in heaven”
or I find myself swearing at the politicians on the TV screen,
or speaking up for what is right and good,
or making lentil soup or marveling at the shear beauty of an Amaryllis in full bloom,
I feel her presence close beside me.
A few weeks ago in the weight room was one of these times.
When I felt her presence.
When I knew she was close beside me.
It was like, all of a sudden,
everything that seemed to separate us didn’t have so much power anymore.
I could see her face and hear her voice.
I was standing again with her in her backyard on a hot summer day,
listening to her talk as she deadheaded plants.
And she was real!
It was like a curtain that normally stays closed had been pulled back for a moment,
and here we were again, together.
Try as I wanted to dismiss it as unresolved grief, I couldn’t.
She was present me.
As present as the tears that were welling up in my eyes.
It’s this presence that we celebrate today, All Saints Day.
I’m not talking about déjà vu or ghosts.
I’m talking about something that is real.
As real as all of us sitting here today.
I’m talking about the Communion of Saints.
All Saints Day is a day when we celebrate the Communion of Saints,
a vast family of people.
A family that includes the living and dead.
Those of us gathered here today,
as well as the people on this altar.
Those we’ve loved and who’ve loved us yet whom we see no longer.
This family is so big, so wonder-full,
that it transcends everything that separates us from one another:
time and space and even death.
In the Communion of Saints, all of these are but a breath,
a comma in between life and life everlasting.
We might not think about the Communion of Saints too much as we go about our routines.
We’re a part of it, and it’s always with us, always near.
But most of the time, it seems invisible.
We’re oblivious to it.
I certainly am.
Every once in a while, though, we get a glimpse of it.
We smell it or taste it or hear its music.
Or we feel it deep in our gut.
Perhaps like me,
caught off guard by Jeanette’s presence with me in the weight room,
we’re reduced to tears by it.
And then we know that it is real.
Today, All Saints, is one of these times.
One of these times when we see in plain view
what is always present to us but we often miss.
One of those times when the curtain that seems to separate us
from the ones we’ve lost in death is opened wide—
better yet, torn down altogether—
and we see one another face-to-face again.
One of those times when we know ourselves to all be part of this family.
I have to confess,
I don’t know exactly what happens to us when we die.
Sometimes, when people find out what I do for a living,
this is the first question they have for me.
What do I think about heaven?
I think they assume that as a priest,
I must spend all my time praying and thinking about heaven.
They’re sometimes a little shocked when I tell them
I really don’t know what heaven is like.
but that I hope it’s not all clouds and harps and wings and white robes
and perfect people because this all sounds really boring.
I tell them that I prefer to think of heaven as a great meal.
A feast with everything our hearts could desire.
Delicious food and wine poured out freely.
And the whole Communion of Saints is there.
Jesus is there.
The patriarchs and matriarchs and prophets are there.
The apostles and Mary, the Mother of God, are there.
Saints and martyrs are there.
Sinners are there.
Jeanette is there.
And your loved ones who’ve died are there too.
Your mom or dad.
Your sister or brother.
Your spouse, your husband, your wife.
Your child.
Your friend.
They’re all there at the feast.
And you and I are invited to the feast too.
Even now, we’re invited to it.
In this lifetime.
At this table.
Until the day when death summons us—
as it will all of us—
and we take up our places at the eternal banquet.
Amen.
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