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On this day, I remember another tradition from my junior year of college at California Lutheran University when I studied abroad at the University of Vienna. In Austria, All Saints Day was a public holiday. Schools and shops were closed. Public transportation was rerouted to the large municipal cemetery at the edge of the city. Friends and families would travel together to the cemetery, often bringing with them candles, food, and drink to share around the graves of loved ones who had died, to remember and to give thanks.
Many of us will go to church today. Some will celebrate this festival on Sunday. Others will use the festival to open a month-long period of remembrance during November. I hope that you might take time today or during this week to remember and give thanks for those who have gone before, to light a votive candle in their memory, and to hold them in your hearts. Thanksgiving and gratitude for their lives lived well among us gives us strength and courage for the journey ahead for each of us.
This All Saints Day, our world is especially troubled and distressed. Our friends, colleagues, and neighbors are in peril and at risk. War and violence threaten their lives and the survival of so many communities we care deeply about. Some we know as beloved will die before the day ends. “Surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), we hold in our hearts any of those who are at risk this day, and we pray for strength, compassion, and courage for them in the midst of so much heartbreak, despair, and destruction. Lord, have mercy.
May this great cloud of witnesses surround us as we begin to take steps together in our ministry as a Synod. May God bless us, our work, and our ministry. May the inheritance of those who have gone before us be for us the courage and strength we need for the peace and justice we seek.
In Christ,
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