While my favorite month is October with its cooler temperatures, beautiful colors, and vivid change, it is followed by November with its own fulness of life.
November begins with All Saints’ Day. Last Sunday, we remembered 21 persons in worship who have died in the last year with the affirmation, “Absent from us. Present with God.”
While not always recognized as a major “holy day” in the Christian year, All Saints’ Day reminds us that we are related to each other not only biologically, but spiritually through faith. One of the most familiar scripture passages used on All Saints’ Day observances refers to the saints who have gone before us as “a huge cloud of witnesses to the life of faith” (Hebrews 12:1).
I appreciate Father Richard Rohr’s description that, “Saints are those who wake up while in this world, instead of waiting for the next one” (Father Richard Rohr, “Public Virtue”, 11/6/20).
Saints are those persons to whom we look for guidance on living through joyful and painful seasons of time. And their basic character is like that of Jesus who came to serve rather than be served.
The stress, confusion, division, and contention of our federal, state, and local elections clearly call for recovering public virtue.
In the face of this need, the public witness of the Church comes through lives of service, humility, compassion, and justice.
Again, from this past week’s meditations by Father Richard Rohr:
“The mystery of the body of Christ turns the focus outward, to ask: how can I be good for the sake of my neighborhood, my city, my church, my community, and even the world?” (Father Richard Rohr, “Public Virtue”, 11/1/20).
“History is continually graced with people who have been transformed and somehow learned to act beyond and outside their self-interest for the good of the world, people who clearly operated by a power larger than their own. They are exemplars of public virtue” (Father Richard Rohr, “Public Virtue”, 11/6/20).
We conclude November with Thanksgiving which is a season I wish officially lasted longer rather than being left behind by the commercial Christmas season. Thanksgiving directs us to the deep roots and broad branches and towering clouds of service, humility, compassion, and justice in the lives of the saints and our families and communities.
We clearly have a lot of work to do in the wake of the elections and in the midst of the COVID pandemic. May our gratitude for the saints guide our paths and allow us to serve side by side with each other.