All Souls' Day
All Souls' Day: 2nd November, 1999
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
In Robert Graves' I Claudius, the dying Livia, casting a backward glance over
the series of murders which she instigated in order to secure the succession of
her son Tiberius, implores Claudius and Caligula to have her declared to be of
divine status on her death, so that she will automatically enter heaven.
Otherwise, she fears an eternity of torment.
We do not offer this or any eucharist in the fear that without it, our loved
ones will not be pushed through the pearly gates of metaphor, because earthly
survivors have not manipulated the right mechanism. The good things which pass
human understanding which God promises to bestow beyond this life are poured
out in eternity as a result of his gracious and consistent goodness and
generosity, and do not await our prayer. But as for us in this life the
eucharist focuses in a most concentrated way on the good things we receive from
God's bounty, so it also speaks to us of something they now enjoy, that
supremely all-giving presence, which we as yet dimly apprehend.
Medieval Europeans regarded tragic love as being most fully represented by
Dido, the queen of Carthage. The Latin epic poet Virgil painted her falling
inextricably in love with the Trojan prince Aeneas as he requistions his ships
at Carthage before sailing on to Italy. She suicides at his departure. Later,
Aeneas visits the underworld, where he encounters Dido among the spirits of the
departed, not freed through death from the restricted insights of mortality's
partial vision, but 'roaming the broad wood with her wound fresh upon her . . .
and in her the anger blazed and grimly she glared, holding her gaze averted and
fixed on the ground . . . she at length flung herself away, and in hatred
still, fled back into the shadows . . .' For her, in Virgil's vision, her
future is to be eternally burdened with the limited vision and embittering
despair she knew at the moment of her death.
While we believe that the actions we commit and the choices we make in this
world have a significant effect on the kind of relationship we have with God
beyond death, scripture does not bind us to believe that the soul is bound to
an eternity where it remains precisely as it was at the moment of death.
Rather, for those, who however imperfectly, have sought to live in response to
God's will, the eternal life which exposes them to His presence, free from
earthly impediments, can hardly leave them unaltered, but rather the very grace
to which they are the more clearly exposed must change them. If, for us in this
life, the eucharist focuses Jesus' presence, a presence which causes and feeds
the life of grace within us, changing us, so then it would seem to be an
appropriate act of worship to make, uniting us with Him whose enlivening
presence is as much, if not more, a source of growth in grace to them. Rather,
that growth in grace, which we experience in this life through Christ's
presence, marks the beginning of a progress which can only be completed and
fulfilled in that presence beyond this world.
And so we offer the eucharist, not because without it, they would remain
irrevocably fixed as they were at the moment of death, but because it unites us
to that eternal life which they fully enjoy. And Christ, to whom they are all
alive, becomes the bond of union between those who have faith and worship in
this life, and those who, in whatever way it happens, offer their worship
beyond death. The classical world, while it believed in a future life,
envisaged us as totally separated from it by the waters of the Styx; we claim,
not that we enjoy a medium-like communing of spirits, but that we are all
engaged in one action, which, in spite of the finality of physical separation,
is a point of continuing spiritual unity.
Lastly, it is no article of faith, that we should be convinced of a continuing
concern of theirs for us, of the kind that we consciously have of each other,
and of our various circumstances. Yet that early Christian world of the fourth
century seemed convinced that a deep Christ-centred love for others flowed from
that central core of identity which remained alive to God beyond this world,
and that the deep yearnings and concerns for others known in this life would
somehow continue to shape their worship and prayer beyond our world.
A poignant and heart-rending cry bursts from such a conviction about the nature
of love in the lines of Paulinus, a fourth century Roman aristocrat, at one
time a consul, and eventually bishop of Nola. As a young man, he had been pupil
of the older Ausonius, tutor to the emperor, and like Paulinus, a distinguished
public servant from an established family. Ausonius remained all his life an
urbane, elegant and dignified figure, committed to no excess or zeal of
conviction of any kind. But Paulinus converted to the new religion, his mind 'a
torch., flaming through the secrets of eternity', as he put it, forsaking the
attitude in which he had been educated, which taught him that no one religion
could claim to represent truth completely. He left the world of learning, and
went to Spain. Ausonius for four years received no correspondence from the once
star pupil, and questioned the quality of their former friendship in
impassioned letters of reproach: the younger man had 'answered other things,
but not said that he would return'. Finally, the silence was broken. Paulinus
protested that not earthly separation, no that more permanent alteration
wrought by death, should allow Ausonius to think that the love formerly
existing between them had altered, but rather that it was eternal by its
nature.
For us, we cannot claim as an article of faith, or even of logic, that the
departed know our current circumstances; yet if the deepest love which we know
in them is mutual and reciprocal, then that continuing life of theirs in God's
presence, being in some sense a life of love, must contain some sense of
mutuality and prayer and love for God's creatures, and for the fulfilment of
his will in them. And Paulinus' words, with which I close, express most
clearly, that eternity of love they enjoy, and to which we too are called:
I, through all chances that are given to mortals,
And through all fates that be,
So long as this close prison shall contain me,
Yea, though a world shall sunder me and thee,
Thee shall I behold, in every fibre woven,
Not with dumb lips, nor with averted face
Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,
Instant and present, thou, in every place.
Yea, when the prison of this flesh is broken,
And from the earth I shall have gone my way,
Wheresoe'er in the wide universe I stay me,
There shall I bear thee, as I do today.
Think not the end, that from my body frees me,
Breaks and unshackles from my love to thee;
Triumphs the soul above its house in ruin,
Deathless, begot of immortality.
Still must she keep her senses and affections,
Hold them as dear as life itself to be.
Could she choose death, then might she choose forgetting:
Living, remembering, to eternity.
(Paulinus of Nola, Ad Ausonium)
The study of liturgy shows us that while individual Christian communities were
quick to develop a devotion to individual local Christian heroes, the
development of a calendar or catalogue of saints whose feasts were observed by
the majority of Christians took a much longer time to emerge. But in between
these two points, sermons for this time of the year in both western and
eastern, African, Greek and latin communities, show that in anticipation of
Christmas, the different communities of the expanding Christian world turned to
the new testament passages that presented the individuals linked with Jesus
birth and the preparation for his coming - John the baptist, his parents
zechariah and Elizabeth, and the Mother of the Lord. Although the Sundays in
this preparation were not thought of as saints days, the men and women who
appear in the opening chapters of Luke and matthew became the first of the
faithful to be offered a liturgical focus by all Christian people - and the
advent Sundays in which their part in salvation history was celebrated was in
real terms their first celebration across the whole spectrum of the church. So
the lections of this Sunday and of the following week echo a very ancient
attitude.
The majestic and measured cadences of St John's prologue which we have just
heard invite us to focus on John the baptist, but they hardly highlight him as
the apparently extrordinary figure who steps out from the pages of the other
gospels. In facxt, if you go into the Handfield chapel and look at the panels
of the Van Eyck altar piece that are currently exposed - panels that focus on
the advent figures of the baptist and the mother of the Lord - they all appear
relatively respectable, as though nothing extraoridnary is happening and as
though those present are simply the kind of people whom you should expect to be
there, just being themselves. If John the Baptist here hardly looks the wild
and challenging figure that emerged from the desert, there is something very
attractive about the quiet domesticity of the setting in which the Annunciation
takes place. Medieval Christians made the Holy Family a very domestic unit
indeed, just like a model medieval family, and gave Jesus greatgrandparents on
maternal line called Stollanus and Esmerentia, as well as cousins with names
like Esmeria, Mamelia and Servius (bishop of Tongres) - all names totally
unknown in the rest of the Jewish world.
But if there have been many different ways beyond these of making the people
who surrounded Jesus birth seem quite ordinary, the sort of people and family
we are all familiar with, the biblical texts that deal with the individuals who
are part of the preparation for Jesus birth contain many signals, some of them
easily lost for later generations, that hint that some rather unusual people
are involved in this whole business - people that you wouldn't normally expect.
Take for example, the part of the narrative leading up to Jesus birth that most
readers find tries their attention to the maximum - the genealogical table in
Matthew. All those generations that begat further generations, and a sign of
relief in coming to the end. But if you look carefully, the list contains a
handful of women's names: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. St Jerome among
other significant early Christian writers, thought that these particular women
featured because they are all in his view associated with some degree of
scandal - and that this was Matthew's way of recalling us to Jesus place as the
saviour of a humanity that often gets muddied in such things. But for Jesus
Jewish contemporaries, these women were not necessarily figures of scandal. If
Rahab was a prostitute, she had done the right thing protecting Jewish spies in
Jericho, and nonbiblical tradition had Joshua marrying her, and early Christian
writers such as the writer of the letter to the hebrews treated her as a model
of faith. Perhaps a spell of employment in the sex industry isnt such a bad
thing on the heavenly cv; Bathsheba was an active agent in adultery with David,
but was also the mother of the great Solomon, the temple builder.
But if the women in the genealogy arent necessarily objects of scandal, Jerome
and others were right in sensing that they werent there by accident, but
pointed in a particular direction. The unions in which they were involved all
had some irregularity about them. In the Jewish piety of period between the Old
and New Testaments, they were seen as examples of how God uses the unexpected
to triumph over human obstacles.
There are other signals that the Gospel's early hearers would have quickly
picked up. The description of John baptist as one who would never touch wine or
strong drink given by Gabriel to John's father in Luke, and his diet of wild
honey and locusts would have immediately brought to mind another extraordinary
figure, Samson, of whom an angel had made a similar statement before his
conception. But Samson despite his vow of abstience hardly cuts an ascetic
figure or a model of devotion with his baiting of Philistines and womanising.
In Judges he appears as a freedom fighter, but his behaviour can also read like
that of a member of a racist street gang, strong on violence and sex as a way
of demonstrating the macho thing.
Another passage that would have sent signals to early listeners is the
description of the visit by Elizabeth to Mary in Luke's gospel. The copy of
the Albertinelli painting shows it as a gracious if formal event involving two
dignified , almost noble, matrons. But when Elizabeth says to Mary 'Blessed are
you among women and blesssed is the fruit of your womb' early hearers of the
gospel would have recalled almost identical words in other scriptural stories,
and spoken to two quite different women. In Judges, Deborah, the prophetess
says 'Blessed be Jael among women': Jael has just offered hospitality to an
enemy general, and brained him in his sleep with a tentpeg. Jael is a total
failure as a model of pacifism; much better company really for Samson. And in
another, apocryphal book, Uzziah the son of Micah says to Judith, 'Blessed are
you, daughter, among all women on earth'. Her contribution to the salvation of
God's people occurs when the town of Bethulia is besieged by the Assyrian
general Holofernes,, She allows his troops to capture her, and offers him help
in his conquest of Judea. She allows him to think that she is willing to be
seduced, but when he is sufficiently drunk, she beheads him with his own sword
in his tent. Another female freedom fighter. A constant ingredient since the
middle ages in the Jewish feast of dedication or lights (hanukkah) has been
cheese based foods, because tradition developed that Judith accelerated
Holoferness drubnkeness by feeding him a surfeit of salty cheese, which caused
him to drink copious quantities of wine.
The point should now be clear that not only are the primary figures in the
preparation for Jesus - John baptist and his Mother - presented in the gospel
as peculiar or unconventional figures from one or another point of view, but
this is reinforced by echoes of other figures, now firmly woven into the
telling of the story of the saving acts of God, whose character or behaviour
was likewise by some standard, irregular. God's presence has been known in a
motley array of guerilla and resistance leaders, using a variety of wiles, some
quite devious and manipulative, to outwit the enemy. And Mary has an ancestry
encompassing women who might have sold their stories to the tabloids.
What does this say to us? It ivites us to recognise the possibility of God's
presence in human vessels where it might at first be unexpected. We have all
heard this before, it is hardly new: for most preachers, the whole point of 'no
room at the inn' is that our no to one person or category of persons might well
be a closing of a door on something of God. Churches are probably better at
accepting the possibility of God in the unusual, the unexpected when dealing
with thisthrough organisations and groups. Anglicans in Melbourne might well
feel some pride in the fact that the first non-government organisation in this
country to employ a professional social worker was one of ours, the BSL.
Precisely because they are ngos, church organisations can sometimes take on
issues and groups of people that are 'hot': This can be through controversy, -
the churches were generally making more noises over a long period of time in
public over disturbing events in East Timor, that any elected government. It
can also be a matter of mere numbers (churches sometimes take on groups that
are too small to attract corporate funding - eg some of the first specialist
hospitalisation for Altzheimers patients, in WA in the early 80s). And a former
archbishop who had a significant profile in the area of social service delivery
and the churches, Geoffrey Sambell, reminded practicing Christians that it was
inherent in the values of the gospel that it was not the easiest causes and
groups that should be advocated and championed, but the difficult and
problematical.
But if we sometimes have a good record over this in a corporate way, we still
need to take this much more to heart at the individual level. I am still called
through the echoes of Samson, Jael and Judith in the people who are part of the
preparation for Jesus, to seek for God's presence in their modern equivalents -
and whoever these may be, they are hardly the staple stuff of Anglican
congregations, or indeed of any mainstream churches, or churches of any kind.
Where others might declare the absence of God, I am invited to search and find.
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