Walking with All the Saints

       I’ve always loved the summer’s care-free adventures.  But autumn seems to say the party is over. It makes us wonder where all the time has gone.  

      Walking through the fall-colored hills where I grew up used to fill me with nostalgia.  My old haunts would bring back difficult memories.  Is there anything more painful than the memory of unrequited love?  Are there regrets that run deeper than thinking we have missed opportunities for friendship?  Such autumn walks can be difficult because many of the people we would most like to walk with us are no longer here.

     Yet, the more I become acquainted with grief the more I appreciate my autumn walks and the longing they awaken.  As death approaches I’m assured my “redemption is nearer than when I first believed.”   Once I could not see Hallows Eve as anything but a morbid obsession with death.  Now, I see the celebration of All Saints Eve as an affirmation of the truth Jesus taught: “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” 

      Christians believe in something called the “communion of the saints.”  It means the dead are still present to us.  The Hebrew writer imagines us walking into an arena, where we are “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses” who cheer for us.   When the church receives the Communion, (or the Lord’s Supper) we mysteriously walk into this crowd.  We hear their reassuring voices re-echoing in our hearts.  By mysteriously connecting with Jesus, we are ushered into the presence of a great host who are joined to Christ’s cause.  

      Eating at the Lord’s Table takes us “back to this future.” It is a foretaste of the family reunion we don’t want to miss. With Mary in the garden of Christ’s resurrection (John 20:16) we discover that those who love Jesus never have to say good bye for the last time.   Someday we shall see the departed just like Mary saw the dead and risen Jesus. And, like Mary, we will hear our loved ones greet us again by name.

A Halloween Walk

      In May of 2014 I set off from the village of Nether Stowe, past the remains of a Norman Castle and into the Quantock Hills.  Following the footsteps of the belated poet-philosopher, Samuel Coleridge, I hoped to glimpse what filled his imagination as he trampled over these English hills.  

     I followed a beautiful brook to a rise from which I could see West across the Bristol Channel into Wales.  But then I turned eastward into a thick, dark wood…   Stumbling onto the depressions of an iron-age fort, my sixth sense began to feel this place’s history of occult violence. The forest is literally rooted in thousands of years of bloodshed. 

     One spot is called Walford’s Gibbet, where in 1789 John Walford, murdered his pregnant wife.  The locals carted him and his sobbing mistress to this spot in order to restore the land’s equilibrium. They hung Walford on a gallows, leaving his body until it fell to the ground exactly one year from the day of the murder.

    I escaped out on a delicate meadow called a heath. But then, I remembered Shakespeare in Macbeth evidently believed witches were regularly out upon such heaths stirring the pot of history.  

       No wonder such a walk inspired Coleridge to write, “I readily believe there to be more invisible beings, than visible ones in the universe.”  Such walks inspired Coleridge to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which a character kills an albatross.  The sailors in the poem blame the ship’s misfortunes on the killing’s ill-effects, and they hang the dead bird around the Mariner’s neck as a remedy.  

      Today, few sports fans are aware of this origin for the expression about an athlete “carrying an albatross around his neck.”  But the persistence of the expression suggests we do intuitively understand carrying around psycho-spiritual burdens from past mistakes.   

      Nobody escapes such burdens if they seek to navigate the spiritual world without guidance.  There are macabre realities that will weigh us down.  Often the only godly response is to pray and run to the one who frees us from nature’s haunting memories.