What I know of the Kingdom haunts me, because it is not mine to lose, and I am sure that it leaves nothing out. We are bound up in existence now and forever not with the grand visions we can fulfill, the wealth we amass, the institutions we create, but with everything and everyone we cast out and forget, the unwanted, our enemies, and ourselves. What Jesus proclaims in our Gospel, in the Sermon on the Plain, is that we should love those things which will be ours forever, and not those that are passing away.
Eternity, too, will be filled with those we love, but surely not just with those we like. All of us in our wholeness are woven together inextricably: there is no me without you, and no you without me. All we have ever known of what it means to be is this space we share. To love one another is not simply to like something of what we do or how we appear, but to embrace our mutual entanglement in a way that nothing can destroy. Life, death: we are all in this together.
So we come to this short season of Allhallowtide, stretching between the Eve of All Hallows, the Feast of All Saints, and the Feast of All Souls, and we are alive and dying right along with everyone and everything else. Alive and dying, we love one another. The division seems to cease, as it will, eventually, eternally. Now and forever are not so very far apart.
***
The Roman playwright Terence gave us the phrase variously translated as something like this: I am a human being, and nothing human is alien to me. We must go further than that, and Christ goes further than that: not only are we made of the same stuff as everyone else, but our own existence is shared with every human being. Not only are we not alien in our faults and flaws and yearnings, our brilliance and our brutality, but this: we really do share one being in Creation. My worst enemies and those I love the most share equally in the existence that is my home.
We really have to love them, because at their very worst, even at their most inhuman, they are a part of us, too. No separation will hold, no division will sustain, it all just falls away. Our ideas of good and evil die along with us, and we carry all of it with us into eternity. Life works on us while we have time to reveal to us this basic truth of our being: we are not separate from anything, and can neither really fear our own destruction, nor find hope in the annihilation of the Other. We go down to the same dust, after all. There is nothing but what is.
***
I do not know the saints as well as I would like, but I do know something of the sinners from whose number they are drawn. We souls are so full of struggle and suffering and are wholly suffused with a beauty that too often is visible to everyone but us.
It is this secret shining deep within, and also all the hurting, hidden things the light illumines that our Creator will always choose and call and love. We are full of woe and wonder, and God is with us even when we are so brutally afraid and afraid that we are alone that we hurt one another and ourselves in unspeakable moments of pain. Life is so very hard, and none of us emerge unscathed, but we really, truly, are never alone.
God is with us, and if that seems like cold comfort, then we must proclaim, too, that God in Christ is human, and as a human being he, too, proclaims: that nothing human is alien to me; that we are not alone, and we are in this together, and it is hard, and it hurts, and somehow life is still worth living, and even having seen it from the side of the dust, God still wills to call Creation good. That includes us all and them all. Friends, lovers, enemies; children and strangers both.
***
Our favourite saints are worthless if we cannot see in them us sinners. To be a human being is to miss the mark and to fall short, not because we are somehow wicked and corrupt, but because we learn by erring, and there is so very much to learn. It takes some of us a lifetime of failure to figure out that we were playing the wrong game all along. The saints are there not as perfect images of getting it right, but as proof that there is holiness that can be found anywhere if you are willing to look for it. That is not alien to you, too. You have in you something of the saintly.
It is easy to celebrate All Saints as a diffuse and mediocre sort of thing, as a way of proclaiming some nebulous and ill-defined holiness that is sometimes found in the human, but this observation is constellated of whole lives, real lives, human lives which were at least as mixed-up and painful as our own. So, too, today we muddle it a little farther with All Souls, and in our muddling we are not diluting what is real but amplifying it. One day tells its tale to another, and somehow between Saturday and Sunday, and with an extra, strange hour inserted in the dead of night, we pretend that there is a difference, but there is none. The sun is always rising, and the night is always aching with the journey from now to now to now, and it is this smooth continuum which cannot really be broken. There is life and our efforts to divide it are illusion, and so, too, our divisions between saints and souls, when really they are sinners all.
There is nothing but the human person, and it is made perfect in Christ not because he was purified of all our bitter bits, but because he found a way to love it all. There are things that make it easier or harder, there are certainly things that we hold onto that it would be better if we could let go. There are things we really must not do if we want to be at peace. Christ loves anyway.
***
If it would be painful for you to be down among the lowly and the broken, then there is pain that will come for you. If hope is a thing you can buy, then you will find it wanting.
If you live as though some day others would reward you for your goodness so long as you deny yourself, then you are squandering the one gift that has been entrusted to you, and missing out on that which is worth everything. If you are waiting to live as a sort of bargain with death, then you will find your bargain wanting.
Jesus tells us that eternity is a reward, it is peace, it is rest and wholeness and good, so long as you would have it. If you can stand to be numbered among all the saints, and all these stray and weary souls, then there is your place; if you imagine that you must be better, or if you wish that they were better, then you may, perhaps, find it disappointing.
***
May you be so haunted by those you love that you can know your place among the whole host of Kingdom, and love all of Creation, as Creation first loved you. May you not be afraid of your wholeness, when God has already and always seen and known those things which you most fear. May you find your joy, your grace, and every reward you could ask for in your life among such saints and sinners as God has given you to love. May our living and dying together be a blessing.