All Faithful Departed and the Love that Never Dies

Each year on All Saints Day, my church brings out portraits and icons of great Saints from ages past, placing them alongside lit candles in the windows of our sanctuary. These Saints lived through different eras and had different life experiences, but their stories contain a common thread; each one of them lived their lives as extraordinary witnesses to God’s work in the world. When they are hung around our sanctuary each November 1st, I am reminded of the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12:1, and am inspired anew by their examples of courage and holiness. No wonder, then, that the Episcopal Church considers it to be one of the seven principal feast days of the year. It’s important to remember the great and holy figures who have gone before us.

The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, also known as All Souls’ Day, is All Saints Day’s sibling celebration that falls on November 2nd and typically receives less attention. The Book of Common Prayer lists it as an optional extension of All Saints Day. In fact, it didn’t even appear in our prayer book until our current 1979 version. However, as someone who works in children’s and youth ministry, my experience has been that today, All Souls’ Day, is at least as important for cultivating the everyday faith of young people as its more famous predecessor, All Saints Day. It is on All Souls that we set time aside to remember those Christians whom we have known and loved ourselves, the ones who have walked with us and shaped our own understanding and experience of faith. How many of us could tell tales of older family members, coaches, youth group leaders, and camp counselors who have been our most important spiritual teachers? For most people, it’s not the famous Saints of old who first showed us what holiness looked like; it’s the more familiar figures with whom we have lived, known, and loved ourselves. 

The Anglican writer and bishop Rowan Williams has described what it’s like to experience encounters with these everyday teachers in the faith who shape us, those whom he simply calls holy people. Williams writes in his book Being Christian that,

Holy people, those who are saints rather than saintly, make you feel better than you are. Or rather, not quite that- these are people who never make me feel complacent about myself, far from it; they make me feel there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity. Look! Here is a life in which God has come alive. Real holiness somehow brings into my life this sense of opening up opportunity, changing things.^[1]

This is the gift and significance of the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed. Each year, we are reminded that it is often our encounters with quiet, everyday faith that impact us the most. Today we have the opportunity not only to remember and give thanks for our loved ones who have gone on before, but to recall the grace we have received through them in our own lives. We are reminded us that we remain connected to our loved ones even beyond death, through our prayers and the memory of their love and witness in our lives. 

On All Souls Day, I always especially think of my grandmothers, both of whom have departed this life. I think of the choices they made decades ago, which have shaped my life today; the way they raised their children, the love they showed to my parents and me, and the great faith they unfailingly proclaimed. It is a worthy legacy; one I can only hope to emulate in my own life.

Who are the figures you remember and give thanks for on All Souls?

What grace have you received from them?