For all the saints. . .

As we observe All Saints and All Souls, now together on the calendar, we tend to look not simply at the names of those who are well remembered but to the many who are anonymous and forgotten.  This is good and salutary -- especially for those who do not canonize the saints with formal process, like Rome.  Over the years as we named in voice and in silence in our hearts the names of those whom we loved who died in the Lord, my own list was largely absent family.  Though fewer and fewer actually remember them the way I do, remembering with thanksgiving the lives of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc., is both a highly emotional moment and a comforting one.  I suspect that as time goes on, this moment will be a different.

Too often the ripple effects of divorce is literally to eliminate one whole side of the family from the lives of the children.  As if that were not significant enough, relationships with the other side of the family is too often strained -- especially when they become aging parents no longer able to give but in need of help.  It seems the bonds of family are strained and some stretched beyond repair as we wake up to an age in which perhaps 1 out of 4 children have either no relationship or a strained relationship which is distant and lacks any regular or meaningful contact.  The drumbeat both of academia and social media seems to support those who have chosen to have no contact with their parents or siblings.  The victimhood which dominates therapy today further sanctions this distance as a essential function of needed self-support for those who hold their families responsible for the wounds they think they bear.

Of course, there are always exceptions which would justify such distance between parents and children.  No one is disputing that.  But when the exception becomes normal in the eyes of the world, we know that we live in difficult times.  How do you resolve this distance?  How do you even restore the desire for contact and relationship?  There was a time when the ties that bind lived through trouble and ease, pain and happiness, want and plenty.  Now it seems that the maintenance of family ties is dependent upon their quality   Relationship is the reward for high quality experiences not the normal pattern for these connections.  Family forever is breaking under the stress of divorce and remarriage, children who have deemed their parents abusive or unworthy of their affection, and a therapeutic culture in which individual and personal health and well-being is a higher priority than familial ties.

You see it in obituaries.  No longer do these death announcements describe much of anything of the life of those who have died.  Cost of publishing and fear of disclosing too much information leaves such death notices stark and cold.  As one who tends to read every obituary, especially, for example, those within my church body, it is as if these lives mattered little to anyone.  Even funerals are becoming the exception rather than the rule, cremains are scattered to the dust of the air without a stone or plot to mark the resting place of the deceased, and family mementos are consigned to the flea markets and thrift stores without even a cursory review of their contents by the surviving family members.  Not long ago at a flea market I saw a medal of honor for sale among other things considered insignificant by their family and even the marketers hawking these goods.  It is a sad testament to the nature of our lives and our deaths.

Part of All Souls is the solemn acknowledgement that all our lives matter to God.  He has redeemed us not because of who we are, what we did, or what we might become but solely out of love for those who saw Him as enemy and stranger.  His love was not easy but sacrificed in death so that the guilty might be forgiven, the lost returned home, the estranged reconciled, and the dead raised to everlasting life.  He did this not by divine fiat but by offering up His only begotten Son for us.  All Saints and All Souls is the celebration not of the sterling lives of the few but the common need of us all met in Christ our Savior and of the pledge and promise that this life is not all there is.  We belong to Him, citizens of a heavenly kingdom not even death can overcome.  In an age when families are estranged by anger and divorce, children and parents separated by old hurts and wounds, and people increasingly isolated and alone, the forgiveness that not only redeems us individually but marks us as members of the family of God is even more important.  In the Divine Service the family is gathered, those seen and those who presence is known but unseen, the foretaste of the eternal feast, for good and bad, the saints forgiven and bound in the blood of the Lamb.