The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
I cannot help on days like this in our tradition, it is on All Saints Sunday, I cannot help but reflect on all of the Saints, the living and the dead. And, my reflection this week led me to remember and reflect upon those members of the Quilt Group here at the Cathedral, a ministry for many years shared by women of this church. Their quilt room was a sanctuary unto itself. Do not enter unless you bring with you the spirit and the gift and the talent and an occasional urge to smoke a cigarette. These were women some of you may remember, and if you’re newer to the Cathedral or visiting this day, these were women who were committed to being together each week for hours, sharing things in common, sharing this place in common, sharing their faith in God in common, sharing their lives in common, and sharing their passion for bringing together their abilities, their gifts, and their talents. Each year, indeed, they did bring together a beautiful patchwork of patterns that would be gifted to the Cathedral through the emergence of a beautiful quilt.
I remember early as a curate hoping and praying that some year one of those quilts would be for me. They were not.
I remember this group because one year, maybe because I was young and didn’t know any better or because God was bracing me, I agreed to drive them in the old church van to Lancaster to the quilt show. There, on that trip, I realized what it was all about. They loved each other, these women. They loved each other. They loved being together. They loved sharing their life stories together. They loved sharing their gifts and talents together. They just, plain and simply, loved each other. This, indeed, was a coming together of beautiful patterns. Beautiful patterns of their lives and their faith and the gifts that they had to offer one another.
This group, some are living now in the saints in heaven, and there are a few of you sitting out there, but on such days as All Saints, it is through relationships like this that we get a glimpse into what it is to be knit together as the Collect for this day speaks to us. That God has knit us together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ. This tradition of ours claims that we are knit together, both the living and the dead. That pattern of lives lived in history by those who have been created and gifted and sent, and those who are now living created and gifted and sent are, indeed, woven together in a fabric that emerges in Christ as a beautiful pattern.
This is such unique theological and existential worldview and is a gift to you and me. But the saints of God, the living and the dead, are patched together in a relationship that is alive, that is intimate, and is dynamic. Fred Beuchner reminds us that the power of this patchwork comes in the belief that in that communion even that death has sure enough put an end to some in this patchwork that death, sure enough, has not ended the relationships that we share with them. He says or however else those who have loved and died may now have come to life since. It is beyond a doubt that they still live 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 they may be. But 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.
On this All Saints’ Day, you may bring with you to this communion, that is to you and me with one another, you may bring with you those to whom you are connected and in relationship with, those who you love and those who love and love you, who indeed are living with the saints of God in heaven. And you may, indeed, I pray, come to understand that this is an intimate patchwork that makes you, you, and makes us a community of faith. It makes us who we are.
I confess to you that I love movies. You probably knew that. I also confess that I’m really trying hard to stay away from any baseball analogies today. But you may remember the two versions of The Night at the Museum movies. Anybody see any of those? Don’t be afraid. The two movies that live in me are The Night at the Museum 1 and 2 and also Where the Wild Things Are, but I haven’t seen the movie. I’m more about the book. I think you know The Night at the Museum is a story that takes place at the Natural History Museum in New York, and the second one takes place there and at the Smithsonian in Washington. This fictitious story is about the magic that happens in those places at night and of which the night watchman is privileged to partake when the doors are shut, the sun goes down, the people leave, and all of those people of history living in those places come to life. It’s fantastic! And the adventures they have as those people come to life and sort out their places and conditions continuously is a wonderful thing.
I confess when the doors are shut and the lights are out and I just need a place to be that I occasionally walk over into the sanctuary and sit in the dark. And I begin to imagine what it would be if we could have a Night at the Cathedral. Maybe we will. I imagine the memorials that are on these walls, or the stitch work that exists in the cushions or in the kneelers, or the fingerprints of DNA that have been left over the centuries on all of the wonderful things that we see and touch and experience here. I wonder if all of those who came through that door, and that door, and who were baptized in that font, might come to life. I literally imagine what it might be to experience a party, a communion with the Sayres and the Packers and the Butlers and the Jeters and the Lindermans and the Potters and the Whiteheads, and there are a few for whom I have some really interesting questions, but I’ll keep them out of this right now. All of those names, all of those people throughout the years who came to this place to meet Jesus, they came to this place to be knit together in a communion. How wonderful it would be, in fact, on All Saints’ Day – how wonderful it is.
Not only do we remember in such a gathering as this, but we recognize that the relationships continue to inform and strengthen us. The pattern, the patchwork, continues to be made new. On this day, we will be delighted because there are more threads being woven into the patchwork as we once again go to that font, as have thousands literally. We celebrate a new beginning as we welcome the newly baptized, and as we insert them into the patchwork that is you and I. And now, Where the Wild Things Are...you see, I believe with all my heart, I believe that we are, indeed, knit together in a communion of saints, the living and the dead. On this day together we gather for that great banquet, and we gather together celebrating that which is the divine. That which is, ties us together and that is the craftsperson, the creator; the one who made us, who celebrates with us as we pour water. And, as we eat bread and wine and we share our faith and our lives, and I hear, as that story in Where the Wild Things Are, I hear the great call to our journey. Let the rumpus begin. Amen.
