1 For all the saints, who from their labours rest,
all who by faith before the world confessed,
your name, O Jesus, be forever blest.
Hallelujah, hallelujah!
Happy End-of-Daylight Savings Time...or not, depending where you live in the country, or even within the province of Ontario. It's all bizarre isn't it? Why mess with our circadian rhythms?
I'm content to celebrate All Saints Day instead, the Christian liturgical festival including All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. Christians "borrowed" the notion from the Druids who believed that this was the "thin place" between this life and the spirit world.
Christians, at least a lot of us, acknowledge the saints and souls of faith who are part of the cloud of witnesses which surrounds us.
My dearly departed mother comes to mind today. She had a deep Christian faith that never wavered even though her life included plenty of hardships, some of which could have been soul-crushing. She sang her faith, was generous to many causes, worked at a food bank, came around on accepting LGBTQ2S persons, didn't hold grudges.
I'm also thinking of a better known Christian, Wendell Berry, an author, professor and farmer. I admired him for decades but when he died in August I experienced the "paralysis of analysis", not able to figure out what to say about such an extraordinary life. An American, Berry wrote essays about the sin of racism decades ago and protested in his 70s against mountaintop coal mining in his native Kentucky. He left academia to return to farming and was eloquent in his assessment of agribusiness that destroyed small communities. Berry's novel Jayber Crow is one of my favourites, a story about nothing and everything that matters.
I hope you can conjure up a saint/soul or two today.
Here is the link to a tribute to Wendell Berry by his friend, Norman Wirzba ttps://www.christiancentury.org/features/wendell-berry-s-vision-sacred-world
The late Bill Moyers, a superb interviewer, sat down with Berry a few years ago
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