Ghosts of Saints Past
Father Pete invited me here to talk about my own journey into the Episcopal church. I am currently at St. Mark’s in Montesano and am entering discernment for ordination. I grew up in various churches and it has been a long journey for me to get where I am today. One of my reasons for becoming an Episcopalian is so that I can stand here as a woman—not something that would have been allowed in the churches I grew up in.
But there are other, deeper reasons. Today is All Saint’s Day. It’s a day that we talk about death and remember loved ones we have lost. This morning, my church had an altar set up with votive candles to memorialize those we have lost. I left my mementoes there with the rest and prayed “In communion with all the saints, I remember….”
What do we mean “communion of the saints”? Some of us have probably stood, like Jesus in the gospel reading, at the grave of someone we love. We have grieved there, just as Jesus wept. It always reminds me of the scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when he finally finds his parents’ graves in the dark graveyard of Godric’s Hallows. Harry and Hermione are wandering in the dark, going from gravestone to gravestone, Hermione nervous all the way. Harry is plagued by doubts about his mission and really just ready to give up. He has lost so many people that he loved and is just tired of it all. He seems so lost and alone in that scene, wondering how to go forward. Finally, Hermione calls him; “Its here.” And he sees it—the gravestones with their names; James and Lily Potter, buried within sight of where they died. He is startled to find a line inscribed on their grave; “The last enemy to be conquered is death.” He wonders if this is some mockery, some plot by Death Eaters. As usual, Hermione has an answer. She explains that it is not part of some wild quest for immortality, the quest of Voldemort, but it speaks of a hope that death is not the end. “It means…you know… living beyond death.”
That is what the passage in Revelation is talking about. Here’s John, the aged apostle, probably a prisoner on a remote island in the Mediterranean. Tired, he’s seen his share of suffering; his share of death; his share of grief. Yet, here he is, having a vision of a new city, a new world, a new world that is beginning right now. Later in the passage he describes the splendor and magnificence of this new world, but what he is really caught up in is the fact that death has been conquered here. There is a new order of things. There is hope that death is not the end.
There are many ways that death is conquered. One way brings us to this day. We remember all those who have gone before us—all those who have died and affirm our communion with them. We state our belief that all of the centuries of dead are not gone forever; that they are still with us now. One of the hymns we sing goes like this;
We on earth have union
With God the Three in One
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
In other words, those whom we have lost are part of this mystical city John was so enraptured with and so are we. Even though death seems so final, we are invited on days like this to see ourselves as part of a bigger picture—one that includes those who have died and those who are living. It invites us to imagine and experience heaven. We celebrate our faith with those who have gone before us.
This summer, I visited England’s Ely Cathedral. The building itself is nearly a thousand years old and a church has been on that site since the seventh century. When you walk into a place like that, there is a strange feeling that you are keeping company with people long dead. After all, the pews I sat in had been sat in my people for hundreds of generations and thousands of people for thousands of years had come to the Cathedral on pilgrimage.
So, in the company of all these “ghosts of pilgrims past,” I wandered around the chapels and walkways. It was this enormous place. I actually stayed there all day—especially through the thunderstorm. And in one of the center chapels was a shrine to Etheldreda, the foundress of the original church in the 670s. As I sat in the chapel and read her story, I felt this connection to her. She was a young woman intent on ministry in a time when it was not always easy for a woman to be involved in the church. Forced into a political marriage by her father, King Anna, she waited many years to do what she felt God had called her to do. Finally, she ran away from her husband and started a double monastery. In the early years of the Celtic church, double monasteries housing both men and women were common. I felt this immediate kindred spirit with the woman who lived nearly 1400 years ago and who was probably buried in some lost grave underneath the cathedral. I too had always felt called by God. I also had many obstacles to overcome. Somehow, I felt, even across so many centuries, that we understood each other. I swear I saw her wink when I got up to leave.
This is part of overcoming death. Harry may have stood at the graves of his parents and felt the finality of death, but later in the book, when he walks out to what he believes to be his own death, it is his parents and those he loves who keep him company on the way. They are not really gone—they are still with him, in memory. His godfather, Sirius, tells him; “We are a part of you…”
When I finally started attending the little Episcopal parish in the town I was living in, I was at the end of my rope. I was desperate to find God. Most of all, I was desperate for community, desperate to find a place where I was loved and accepted for who I was. And that is what I have found, but I found something more than what I was looking for— I found not only community with people in the present. I have found a community of saints that spans generations. I found a church that reverences and remembers and holds communion with the saints of the past as well… people past and present who will guide us into the future. I especially feel that on days like this, when we focus on those who have gone before us. We don’t treat them like they are gone forever, but realize that they are a part of us.
A picture of Etheldreda now sits on a table in my room, and though our lives are separated by 1400 years, our stories connect, because the God that led her to found that monastery is the same God that is leading me. She, and the thousands of others who have gone before, are a part of me, keeping me company as I go forward in life. Amen
