BLOG 11.1.12. “ALL SAINTS DAY: ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE”
I love All Saints (All Halloweds) Day. I love to remember all of those remarkable people (saints) in my own life who have encouraged and blessed and prayed for me along the way, often in the dark nights of my soul. And I love to think of all of those from former generations and from far away places, who have impacted me, not to mention those who have written all of the hymns that so daily enrich my life and exalted Christ.
But … let me on this 2012 All Saints Day think in a different dimension. What of those saints yet unborn? The psalmist speaks of them: “Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord” (Psalm 102:18). Whom will they see, and who will be the models of robust faith and obedience and creativity—of salt and light and of transformational kingdom influence for them?
I don’t want them to see sterile and colorless and impotent and churchified “religious Christians.” I don’t want them to lament about Christian faith, as the figure in Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek did about life in general: “ … it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale blue, hollow words in a vacuum. … emptied …no more seed, no more excrement, no more blood. Everything turned into words, every set of words into musical jugglery, … he sits in solitude and decomposes the music into mute mathematical equations.”
God forbid that the next generation should see such in those of us of this generation who are ostensibly Christ’s church.
I want the coming generation of saints to have their appetite whetted by my generation. I want them to see in me, and us, God’s new creation in its most robust truly human demonstration. I want them to have wholesome models, and teachers, and writings which are closer to their cultural setting.
The grand hymn for this day (to my mind) is: “For all the saints, who from their labors rest …” Allow me to propose a crude draft for another verse of this hymn:
For all the saints, who are as yet unborn,
But shall emerge and so Thy church adorn.
May we for them a wholesome model be;
May they give praise, and we examples be,
That all in them your faithful follow’rs see.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Something like that.
For of us in this generation, we can look at those whose testimony formed us, and sing:
Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might,
Thou, Lord, their captain
In the well-fought fight,
Thou in the darkness drear,
Their one true light.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses …” (Hebrews 12:1)
We did not get here by ourselves!
Peace!
