Streams of Mercy

November 1 is All Saints’ Day, and we remember those who have shared with us their faith and faithfulness. Frederick Buechner’s entry for November 1, in his book Listening to Your Life has this to say about this special day:

“How They Do Live On”

How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride, because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us.

Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill, taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us – and through them we come to understand ourselves – in new ways too.

The people we once knew are not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us long ago, but continues to touch us. It is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now, too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.”

May we find peace and joy in remembering and giving thanks “for all the saints.”

Elizabeth