The shining lights in dark places
All Saints' Day: 31st October, 2004
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven. (Lk 6:23)
There is, to use St Paul's memorable phrase, a 'great cloud of witnesses' all around us – supporting, encouraging, and giving us examples. Today we are celebrating that fact, that basic part of the experience of the Christian life, on this All Saints' Eve. We are not in this on our own. Others – and some of them perhaps like any one of us – have taken this road ahead of us. Some of them we know and love quite well and would like to follow, perhaps like a Francis or a Clare. Some are not going to be a way to God that is helpful for us at all. But surround us they most certainly do.
In all their diversity, and all their varied qualities across the centuries and across the cultures and traditions, the saints are in the first instance ordinary people through whom God's most active grace has worked. So their contribution to the understanding of the life of faith, or the nurture and development of the community of faith – wherever they were – has turned out to be quite remarkable. They become shining lights in dark places. They make a difference. They leave an inheritance. They inspire. The Church describes them as people of 'heroic virtue'. Miracles are often declared to have happened in association with them. All of them have pointed to God in Jesus Christ. And because we can pick and choose those who speak particularly to us in our own situation, we can also happily and helpfully honour those in a particular tradition or of a particular culture or circumstance.
There is a fine example of that in the south transept window of this church. This Napier Waller window is a parish memorial for the Second World War for both civilians and members of the armed forces. It has that striking imagine of St Paul's Cathedral London amidst the flames of the blitz in 1941, in the bottom central panel. But really it is a window about a faith tradition and the handing on of that tradition through the centuries. In the most prominent position of all is the crucifixion. Christ crucified: the power of God and the wisdom of God is the text. That faith tradition of the community here in the late 1940s is clearly to be connected right back to the Old Testament prophets and lawgivers. So we have Abraham, Moses and Elijah. It has too the giants of the New Testament like John the Baptist and Peter and Paul and Stephen.
But the faith tradition also flows to a particular national Church: to Alban the first British martyr and Roman soldier, though Saxon kings, through Hilda of Whitby and her sisters to the Catholic Revival of the 19th century. Dr Pusey, companion of Keble and Newman in the Oxford Movement, which has so shaped this particular city church, is there receiving the vows of Marian Hughes in 1841 – the first religious sister in our English Church since the Reformation. Bishop Charles Gore – scholar, teacher, and leader of the next generation of the Catholic movement in Anglicanism well into the 20th century looks content in the balancing panel on the other side. He had only been dead 17 years when this window was dedicated. My great predecessor as vicar of this place, Fr Maynard, therefore did not miss the opportunity to include some of his own saints of our own Anglo Catholic tradition – with or without formal canonisation – in these very striking parts of the context of being a worshipper here at St Peter's. You cannot but notice them.
And as in the wonderful window of the other transept honouring the New Guinea Martyrs of 1942 and the New Guinea mission as a whole, there was no hesitation in claiming and honouring the experience and the witness of the then current generation. There is at least one person for instance in that great New Guinea window that I personally knew and who knew me as a young priest – even though it was designed and installed before I was born. That is important to me and to others here like me.
This then is a vision of the communion of saints that is in touch with the contemporary, ever reinvigorated, generation by generation. But it is also a vision of that great communion that reminds us that we should remember where we have come from and that we should rejoice with and for these inspiring companions we have on this journey. Discern and honour contemporaries as well as those from long ago. Honour then all. Have your spiritual life enriched and blessed by this knowledge and companionship. This great company we are celebrating today is a living and growing thing.
Our Lady chapel with the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is another clear focus of prayer and reflection in this church. Mary the Mother of the Lord is the foremost of all the saints of God. Many of us would light a candle there every time we come here, and offer a prayer of thanks or intercession. St Peter our patron himself – in the narthex, on the lectern and most strikingly presiding over the Parish Hall – is everywhere present around this church in name and symbol. The saints surround us and join us; in prayer, in worship, in service, in being alive to God, as all of us together look to the altar, to the tabernacle with the reserved sacrament, to the living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All of us, in this together.
We have many days in the Church Calendar when a particular saint is remembered and honoured. It is generally the day they died – to celebrate the beginning of life eternal. Some like Our Lady have several days. Peter and Paul both get two. Some of these festivals rate major celebration, changes of liturgical colour and readings. Others, as it were, get an honourable mention if someone remembers.
So there is a sense in which All Saints' tide is not so much a celebration of all those giants of the faith (although they are of course all in there) as a festival day for so many of those like in our great transept windows, who might otherwise not be remembered or recognised. So it is the celebration day for those of every generation who have, to use Mother Teresa of Calcutta's expression, done 'something beautiful for God'. This is the day to celebrate the love and the example of all those who have gone before us who do not have a major festival set aside for them.
All Saints' then is a celebration that spans twenty centuries, but that comes right to the present. It is a day when we thank God for the countless victories in people's lives that have been achieved through the working of God's generous grace and love.
Coupled with this day of celebration is the companion day of All Souls. We will be observing this on Wednesday, with, because of the death of our much loved parishioner Jean Plunkett, a fourth requiem in addition to our normal three. We will honour and pray for the dead and particularly our own dead, through the generations of the life and witness of this parish church of the City of Melbourne. It is going to take us some time, but we are going to pray those names through, each one out loud. Just think of all the memories and life experiences that list will embrace. And consider too those who now have no one left to remember them. Each name that we have on our lists – either from the years mind book read daily at mass on each anniversary day or in the extra names given to us especially for this today – will be read at the 6.15pm High Mass on Wednesday evening. I am told that this was done back in the 1950's at the then early morning High Mass on All Souls'. We now offer this prayer and tribute again in this generation, with many more names from the last fifty years now to be added
All Saints' and All Souls' together then is a very special time. It is celebration, it is thanksgiving, and it is a remembering. It is above all a time of hope. It is therefore no surprise that around the world, especially around the catholic world, that after the great festivals of Christmas and Easter this is one of the most popular times for religious observance. We in our own way and as part of our own living Anglo Catholic tradition are a part of that. And if you are able, come to be part of the companion honouring of All Souls', just as today we have gathered for All Saints'.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven. (Lk 6:23)
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