By the Rev. Mike DiMarcangelo, Associate Pastor and Church of the Vine, Newberg, OR
I was always spooked when my Catholic grandmother would pray to saints or mutter the Hail Mary under her breath. There was something superstitious and even scary about it. Growing up in a non-denominational evangelical context that viewed itself as a haven for former Catholics, my closest sociological parallels to Grandmom’s prayers were nowhere to be found in church. Instead, they were present in the ghost stories and psychic mediums of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps and Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?. No wonder, then, that I would often pray that Jesus would save my Grandmom from this darkness. Her fingering of a rosary and appeal that Mary might “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” was, in my young mind, roughly equivalent to Haley Joel Osment whispering “I see dead people.”
It was in college when I finally mustered up the courage to ask Grandmom why she talked to these dead people. Maybe there was a hidden beauty to her faith that I had yet to understand? Her eyes lit up as she offered a reply: “Just as you ask your friends to pray for you, so I ask my friends to pray for me. And some of my dearest friends are saints who know and love Jesus a lot more than I ever will. I can really use their prayers.”
Grandmom’s reply blew apart my ecclesiological categories. Her words did not compel me to adopt her prayer practices, a conviction that I have since learned is consistent with mainstream Anglican theology and displayed in the absence of praying to saints in our prayer books. Yet the love in her voice floored me. She exuded love for a church that extended well beyond the confines of my white, suburban, 21st-century, evangelical understanding. As far as I knew, the church began with the apostles in Acts, jumped nearly 2,000 years over the irredeemable dark periods of Christian history, emerged again in America in its purest form with Billy Graham’s revivals, and now found its way to me. But I heard in her words that the whole Christian story and all who have come before us matter to God. In Christ they become our friends. My Grandmom helped expose my anemic view of the church. Her words helped draw me toward a lifelong journey of learning to love this communion of saints, a cloud of witnesses truly deserving of the adjective “great” supplied by the author of Hebrews.
All Saints’ Day and the Communion of Saints
All Saints’ is a day that we annually set apart to celebrate our love for this communion of saints, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. It is one of the strongest doses in a series of treatments prescribed by our Anglican tradition for the ecclesiological anemia that people like me have inherited from our church backgrounds. A lot is at stake, but the saints are here to help. And don’t worry: full participation in the communion of saints does not demand the Roman Catholic practice of praying to them!
What do we mean by the “communion of saints” and what is All Saints’ Day?
In order to understand what we might learn from the saints, we should first consider what it means to be in communion with them. When we celebrate All Saints’ on November 1st (or the closest Sunday afterwards), we are not committing an idolatrous act of focusing all of our attention on really good people and averting our gaze from God. The story of saints is always the story of sinners saved by the abundant generosity of Jesus and brought into a transforming relationship with him. In other words, our celebration is first rooted in our crucified, risen, and ascended Lord, the Son of the Father, who breathed the Spirit of God upon his church at Pentecost and united us together as his body in the world. The formation of the body of Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit is what we have been referring to as “the communion of saints,” a 4th century phrase immortalized in the Apostle’s Creed. And when we speak of the communion of saints, or the body of Christ, we speak of all the saints, or All Saints’. This day commemorates the church universal, all those living and dead, known and unknown, those formally canonized as exceptionally holy people, and everyone else received into the church through the waters of baptism throughout the centuries and across the globe.
How do we live in communion with the saints?
Perhaps the most straightforward way we might think of communing with the saints is loving and caring for one another. But this kind of communion only works with Christians who are living and happen to do so in close proximity to us. How do we commune with all of the saints, including those who are no longer alive? Perhaps we can participate in the ancient practice of remembering and telling the stories of Christians who have come before us. Yet, while this is a helpful starting point and one worth imitating, it only begins to scratch the surface.
The deep spiritual bond of the communion of saints made possible through Christ extends across all time and space. This bond is eternal. We are always in communion. And the heartbeat of that communion is our shared worship of the God who has brought us to himself. To quote To Be A Christian: An Anglican Catechism, “All the worship of the Church on earth is a participating in the eternal worship of the Church in heaven (Hebrews 12:22-24)” (p. 58). Every time we worship we live in communion with the saints. Or, in the words of our liturgy, when we praise God we “[join] our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing…to proclaim the glory of [his] Name.” As with every principal feast, All Saints’ Day is a microcosm of our Eucharistic life with God. On this particular Sunday we commemorate the communion of saints, and in doing so we acknowledge that every time we gather in worship we participate in that communion. You will sometimes hear Anglicans refer to any Sunday as a “Little Easter,” for the church celebrates Jesus’ resurrection weekly. In a way, it is also accurate to think of every Sunday as a “Little All Saints’.”
How might our communion with the saints help us follow Jesus?
My Catholic Grandmom helped me see the communion of saints as a deep spiritual bond of friendship. This can be a helpful frame for All Saints’ Day if we understand Christian friendship as companionship and guidance in our life of following Jesus. Through friendship with the saints, both those known and unknown, we are brought closer to our God. As one of the seven Principal Feasts in the Anglican tradition, the Book of Common Prayer appoints a proper collect and preface to the eucharistic prayer for All Saints’ Day. Both of these highlight this theme of the saints as our friends, or companions and guides, in learning to follow Jesus:
Collect
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical Body of your Son: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Proper Preface
For in the multitude of your saints you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses, that we might rejoice in their fellowship, and run with endurance the race that is set before us; and, together with them, receive the crown of glory that never fades away.
In the collect, we encounter the saints as our guides: we “follow” them “in all virtuous and godly living.” They lead us that we might find a life of “ineffable joy” with God. In the proper preface, we see the saints primarily as companions: they are the “great cloud of witnesses” who surround us. And simply being with them compels us to “rejoice in their fellowship” and “run with endurance the race that is set before us,” a race of following and looking unto Jesus (Hebrews 12:1-2).
In friendship with the saints, which is made possible through the church’s eternal worship in heaven and earth, learning the stories of saints long gone, and loving and serving the sisters and brothers who we meet in daily life, we find companionship and guidance in following Jesus. All Saints’ Day can help expand our love for both the church and our Lord. To quote French philosopher Simone Weil, “nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God” (Waiting for God, 31). Weil’s words capture the spirit of All Saints’ Day.
“Festival of Lights” Painting by John August Swanson, found here.
This article is the first part of a two part piece from the Rev. Mike DiMarcangelo of Church of the Vine. To check out part two, an All Saints’ resource list, click here.