Sunday, November 6 was All Saints Sunday. It's that time of year when the faithful community recalls the lives and contributions of those who came before. Both Catholics and Anglicans have Feast Days throughout the year, most days of the year are set aside to honor someone for some act of piety during the last two thousand years of Christiandom. It is good to remember the saintly work by contemporaries like Martin Luther King, Jr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and C.S. Lewis, as well as the earliest Christians, the four evangelists who wrote the Gospels, the disciples, Stephen, the first Martyr, the Blessed Virgin, and Mary Magdalene. But between the newer, more familiar names and the biblically familiar characters, lie the bulk of the saints. Some have notoriety in the secular for good reason, like Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Tubb. But there are so many more who are virtually unknown. And as church membership falls, so also the number of worship services dedicated to these invaluable models, if not deposits, of faith. These now rare public commemorations model the power of faithfulness in the face of intolerance at best, and violent persecution at worst - as much in secular as religious life.
The point of appointing saints is for the sake of memory. These vibrant personalities each take up a day on the calendar, so that at the same time on the same day, the community of the faithful remembers - whatever it is that needs remembering. It keeps us, collectively, from the dire temptation of taking our freedoms and privileges for granted; from blindly believing that whatever equality and civility exists now in some quadrants of society (however imperfect, still) have always been in place. But the work done and the progress made by the people we commemorate is never really done. It continuance is dependent on you and I; it is we who are meant to carry the work of right living and advocacy forward. But the beating heart of this forward movement can only occur in the context of a living past. It is another day, another moment to pause and remember what was, what is, and took to what could be.
