For All The Saints

This Sunday is the day our church celebrates all the faithful who have gone before us into that unknowable land beyond this world.  We remember them, the ways they touched lives while they were here on earth, and how their examples and deeds continue to touch lives. 
Not just the "official" saints, but the everyday saints, the ones you probably have in your own life. 
We remember Sunday school teachers we have known, family members, neighbors, friends, people whose love and caring influenced our lives.  We remember them.  They live on, both in that land beyond, and in our hearts.

After the service at church this morning, I found a text from my sister telling me that our aunt had passed on into the nearer presence of God.  We were afraid this was coming.  She had been very ill, and had lost interest in things that she used to be very involved in.  Not a shock, but still a sadness.  Won't get to hear her heavily southern accented voice again, she won't hug my neck again in this life.  But she is still with me.  She lives on, just as my Pop, my Uncles and cousins who have gone on.  The impressions they made on the lives of others live on.  They are remembered, and remembered with love.

There is a movie out right now that I highly recommend, especially to those who have recently lost a loved one.  The Book of Life is a lovely tale, well told, of love and loss,  and the triumph of love.  In this movie, the afterlife is explained as containing two kingdoms.  Not Heaven and Hell, as we sometimes think of them, but the Land of the Remembered, and the Land of the Forgotten.  The Land of the Remembered is colorful and beautiful, and there are fiestas every day.  The Land of the Forgotten is bleak and colorless, and everyone  there is very quiet and sad.

My aunt will forever dwell in the Land of the Remembered.  She touched SO many lives.  In the town she (and for the last 20 plus years, my Mom) lived in, she is surprisingly well known.  People knew we were relatives, and on our last visit, my sister and I were asked repeatedly how our aunt was doing, and heard many stories of how very much she is loved.  Nearly everyone I met in that town who knew her, adored her.  She was so loving and giving, and until very recently made birthday cakes for LOTS of the people in town.  She taught Sunday School at one of the largest churches in town, and there are legions of former students who will never forget her caring and her teaching. 
All of us in the family will remember her with love for the many wonderful vacations we spent being overfed and spoiled by her.  I have a few recipes that she gave Mom over the years, and all of the congregation of the 11am service at St. Paul's Cathedral in Oklahoma City should call her blessed, because she gave me the recipe for Sausage Balls.  Nearly every time Matt and I did refreshments for the "After the 11" fellowship, I took Sausage Balls.  If I didn't, there were disappointed people who always looked forward to them.  So, all my fellow St. Paul's 11 o'clockers, please say a prayer of thanks for the life of Margaret Smyly, who helped teach me how to always bake with love.

On this day set aside in the church to remember those gone on before us, please think about those folks that you remember from the past, not just family, but friends, coworkers, teachers, anyone who made a difference, however small, in your life.  Remember them, say a prayer of thanks for their lives on this earth, and thereby know that they always dwell in the Land of the Remembered.

I leave you with the words to this hymn we sang today at a baptism.  It is a bit saccharine, but the last verse is so very true.  There are hundreds of thousands still today who do the right thing, the good thing, the difficult thing, the thing Jesus asked his followers to do.  They love their neighbor and show it in their actions.  Like my Aunt Margaret.  May we all do the things that will keep us in the Land of those Remembered with love.


I sing a song of the saints of God,
Patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green:
They were all of them saints of God - and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and his love made them strong;
and they followed the right for Jesus' sake,
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast:
And there's not any reason, no not the least,
why I shouldn't be one too.

They lived not only in ages past,
there are hundreds of thousands still,
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus' will,
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.

Words by Lesbia Scott
From the Episcopal Hymnal 1982, # 293