All Saints

In the week of All Saints Day, I’m standing in the sanctuary of our old Congregational church.  It’s a space that it is hard not to love.  The light has a golden glow as it comes in through stained glass and reflects off the aged cherry wood of the pews and wainscoting.  It is a beautiful room.  It was built back when George Washington was still the President.  The people of this community lavished love and attention on this building back then just as we have continued to over the succeeding generations.  As we think about them, it hard not to be awe-struck by their strength and resolve and by their gifts to us.

It is amazing to think about how this building was built.  Dozens of people gave hundreds of hours to the project.  There were no professional builders then, just local farmers, after a week of hard physical labor around their own primitive farmsteads, coming here and hewing and shaping the beams by hand.  Even the local physician was here hoisting beams in his spare time (we know this because when part of the structure of the church tower collapsed during construction, the local doctor was one of the two people killed). 

They went through all of this work and the attendant expense to meet what was surely an important need.  They wanted to create a space that would have the effect of lifting their thoughts from their everyday concerns to something more sublime, more meaningful, more important, more eternal.  They wanted to be inspired.  And so they didn’t just build a utilitarian building.  They aimed for beauty.  They went for a ceiling high enough to contain their dreams and their grandest thoughts.  They wanted this golden light that lifts the heart.  They wanted a place that would touch something in them that was hungry for touch.  More important to them than getting their own houses fixed up, more important than spending time with their families, more important than any of the pressing tasks of their own private concerns, was this communal act of faith: building a place that would sustain the meaning of their lives.  Certainly, these people were saints in their way.

This is a beautiful thing, and a human thing.  When people on the edge of what seemed like a hostile wilderness were trying to carve out a life for themselves, one of the first things they did was to build a church.  They banded together in a community and expressed their spiritual hopes or their dearest beliefs in a building that was nearly monumental in this place at that time.  They were trying to live up to the legacy of faith that was left to them by their forbearers.  And there is something in this that is absolutely essential to what it means to be fully human.  There is this spiritual longing in most people.  There is a need to look toward some higher loyalty, some deeper truth, some grander meaning than what we find evident in the everyday round of our living.  There is a need to stand in the context of some powerful tradition of meaning that came before us and will live on after us.  That, at heart, is the religious impulse.  We look for something behind or above the mundane realities of our days that makes sense of our stories or gives significance to our striving or explains our sufferings.  Our faith meets, or tries to meet, these deep human needs that must find expression and can never be discounted for that reason.

So much of what we have been given in our religious tradition represents some of the best of our human history.  Our religious tradition is filled with beauty.  There are stories of people making great sacrifices in the name of love.  There are great works of art and some of our most extraordinary pieces of music.  There are generations of charitable work and whole communities made better by the outreach of people of faith.  There are beautiful moral aspirations and profound yet subtle ideas.  It is hard not to be in awe of the sweep and grandeur of the whole tradition in which we stand. 

I have long been seduced by its power and promise.  I have given much of my life to it.  So much of what is good grows out of it.   I have believed that our best hope for changing our world’s injustices and evils must lie within the power of our religious ideals and in the potential of our faith communities.  Surely, people worshipping a God whose primary attribute is supposed to be love must be able to live out that love in acts of kindness and grace.  Surely, people worshipping a God whose love extends to all of humanity must be able to fight for justice and equality.  Surely, people who’s God is beyond all human borders and limitations must be able to transcend the dangers and wars of nationalism and the boundaries of race and class.

But, of course, history doesn’t confirm all of this hopefulness. Our religion has also been at the heart of some of the very worst moments of our human story.  Our religious tradition carries with it superstitions that can make progress, both moral and scientific, almost impossible.  Our religion has been used to rouse the most primitive and violent emotions of whole peoples.  The divisions between religious traditions have subdivided humanity in even more dangerous and volatile rivalries than tribalism or nationalism.  Different visions of what is true and ultimate, when seen as final and immutable, put people into separate and often irreconcilable moral universes that exacerbate every possibility of misunderstanding.

And so it is a mixed legacy that we have been handed. Our saints from the past are broken saints.  And so we need to honor the gifts of our tradition.  We need to remember the sacrifices and labors of those who have given us this place that we share, the ideals that we cherish, and the timeworn words and songs where we continue to find inspiration.  We stand in debt to all those who worshipped here, built here, cried here, celebrated here and died here.  We are their legacy.  Our community is simply the continuation of theirs, and so, on it will go when we are gone.  But the legacy is mixed.  And so it needs our contributions as well.  We must seek to bend our tradition further in the direction of love and understanding.  We must be the witnesses for God’s grace is our times beyond the limits of our forbearers understandings.  We must be the ones who break down some of the barriers and prejudice that our own faith tradition has created.  We must leave our own legacy of faith behind us—a faith that moves into God’s future.  Where we have been left a tradition that divides, we can help overcome divisions.  Where we have been left a set of beliefs that excludes, we can open the doors of our community.  Where we have found narrow prejudices, we can stretch the limits of our souls.  That way, we become the broken saints that future generations can look back and both admire and transcend.  We too are building something that we can proudly leave behind us.