Several evenings ago, I bundled up and took a long walk on a very dark, bracing, crisp autumn night in rural upstate New York. I walked along a lakeside route I know well; it’s a path that my family has walked for five generations. I have walked it for more than fifty years myself and remember vividly walking it often with my grandmother and with my parents as if it were yesterday. It is a part of me.
Above, in the cloudless, moonless night, the brilliant, expansive welkin of dazzling stars enveloped the earth beneath. My mind was drawn to that lovely line from the Mozarabic evening hymn (as translated by Anne LeCroy): “While in the heavens choirs of stars appearing hallow the nightfall.” (Hymn 34)
When our girls were small, we would often point to the brightest star in the night sky and tell them that their Nana, gone much too early in her life, loved them very much (Oh, and she did!) and was watching over them. Sometimes they would point to a bright light in the night sky and cry delightedly, “Look, there’s Nana!” They still had their other grandparents then, but their Nana was with them, too. They could sense it and the star in the sky proved it. Now all of the grandparents are gone, but they are still deeply loved and very much present in our lives every day as we catch a glimpse of a familiar smile, a pose, a mannerism, or hear something said that we’ve heard so many times before. We are still surrounded by those we love and that love us – the great cloud of witnesses.
Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day. It is the day that the Church remembers all of God’s saints – those who are with us in this life (the Church Militant), those who have gone before us (the Church Triumphant), and those whose time has not yet come on the earth. During All Saints-tide, we sing the ancient text from the Salisbury Diurnal, “Holy is the true Light” and about those who have “endured in the heat of the conflict.” We sing, “Who are these like stars appearing, these, before God’s throne who stand?” (Hymn 286) and we pray for those who have preceded us with our supplicatory, “May light perpetual shine upon them.”
As I walked the same, familiar route – the one I have walked for well over a half-century – each of these thoughts passed through my mind as I gazed heavenward. As each moment passed my eyes grew ever more accustomed to the deep darkness and I beheld ever-increasing numbers of heavenly pinpoints and clusters of light.
There are between 500 billion and one trillion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Many of those stars, like our own sun, play host to their own solar systems. We don’t know how many galaxies there are in the universe but science, with its current technology, can see about 60 billion of them. The architect of the cosmos – a God whose glory and power and dominion is unfathomable to us – whose arms fashioned the heavens and were then nailed to the hard wood of the cross is just this vast. But God is also.intimate with each of us as we run our course through this life.
The heavens that night glimmered in infinite beauty. Could there be a better metaphor for All Saints’ Day?
.....Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay .....aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance .....the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, .....who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and .....is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from .....sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or .....fainthearted. (Hebrews 12:1-3)
We are now enduring the heat of our own conflict as we face down the COVID-19 virus and as cases are rising once again. We are just days away from a contentious election that may well spur violence in the streets of our cities and towns. And we all are worried about things known only to us and to God. But no matter what havoc is wrought by a pandemic or what happens politically, these dark things are ephemeral. Light is eternal.
Go outside and gaze at the heavens. The ineffable joys of Paradise await us all in the blessed company of the saints in light.
.....Holy is the true Light,
.....and passing wonderful,
.....blending radiance to them that endured
.....in the heat of the conflict.
.....From Christ they inherit a home of unfailing splendour.
.....Wherein they rejoice with gladness evermore. (The Salisbury Diurnal)
Peace and light,
Rob Lehman
Organist and Choirmaster
