One family, we dwell in Him;
One church above, beneath;
Though now divided by the stream,
The narrow stream of death.
One army of the living God,
To His command we bow;
Part of the host have crossed the flood
And part are crossing now.
—Charles Wesley (1701-1778)
November 1st, 2007, Munich, Germany.
Slowly, aimlessly, head down and shoulders drawn up to my ears, I trudged through the damp hollowness of Munich’s vast English Garden. Just a block from the apartment we had found on a house-hunting trip the previous April, this huge urban park had held, on the outset at least, expansive open-air promise. Our oldest son, I’d thought, would be coming home to us from his first semester at college in the U.S. to celebrate a Bavarian Christmas by cross-country skiing with his Dad and little brothers through the park’s many kilometers of trails. He would share a room with his 16-year-old sister and they would jog here together early mornings before she would catch her bus to school. He and I would bike the beautiful six-minute direct shot across the park from our door to the Universität in the Ludwigstrasse. He would easily make friends and probably sit it on lectures and hang out in all the cafés in the student district along the Leopoldstrasse. Yes, that’s how things would look while he would live with us for the few weeks until he would receive his mission call.
Like a motor stalling and unable to turn over, my mind kept churning and grinding through all those plans. As if churning could undo or grinding would redo what now was undoable. Reality, as I felt it closing in on my body bundled in layers but chilled through to the marrow, was impossibly, unbelievably irreversible. Against a late-autumn wind, I kept walking. Wet snowflakes stuck to the front of my coat like images of my son did to my memory. I shoved my gloved hands deeper into my pockets.
Three months new to this town. Four months new to this planet called grief. On this, Germany’s Allerheiligen Tag, (All Saints’ Day), I watched the reddish mud rimming the edges of my boots, but saw in my mind only the reddish earth cut wide to swallow up my child’s coffin. Sternly, I sucked in the piercing cold which stunned my lungs and I spluttered, wheezing into the fibers of my charcoal grey muffler. I had to stop to breathe. I had to orient myself.
And it was only then I realized my mud-caked boots had taken me to a bridge. Under the bridge was a canal. In the canal was water. And that water, as I barely dared to look at it, shusshed with the same benign rhythm and evil gray-green glassiness of the far-off irrigation canal water which had taken my son’s life when he plunged in twice, trying to save a classmate. Panic clenched my torso and my knees locked as I let out a hissing sound that was neither breath nor curse, but the last fizzling trace of defiance.
There, on that All Saints’ Day, staring into waters alive with death, my thoughts darted to saints. Who are they? What does it mean to be one? The saints of All Saints’ Day are canonized, mostly Italian, martyrs many of them, whose portraits often feature a softly-tilted head, a halo or two, and pastel clouds bearing lots of cherubim. Just the type of saint my down-to-earth son would never have called himself.
He did call himself a Latter-Day Saint, though, and a faithful one. Hardly beatified, more drum-beating than harp-strumming, he was an Everyman’s saint like so many of us who, I’d guess, are the flawed and fumbling but nonetheless sincerely striving “saints” Elder Ballard described in this last General Conference, people who are “seeking to make their lives holy by covenanting to follow Christ.” Elder Ballard continued, “We follow Him by being Latter-day Saints—latter-day disciples.”
Latter-day, every-day saints. For this kind of saint there is a separate day of recognition: Allerseelen Tag, All Souls’ Day, November 2nd , the day following All Saints’ Day. The two back-to-back holidays suggest to me the shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity between angels and mortals, the “communion of saints”, a central tenet of Catholicism, actually, which points to the spiritual union between the “St.” saints and the title-less, nameless, earth-bound types. The former, according to Catholic doctrine, are the “church triumphant”, (followers of Christ who have “made it”), and the latter, the “church militant”, (those onward Christian soldiers who have yet to make their way). The beauty is that all are one church, the body of Christ, as Paul puts it—Saints, Incorporated, if you will—and all depend upon the support of their counterpart (or counterrealm) saints to build on the earth God’s kingdom as it is in heaven.
One Christian writer, H. E. Manning, puts it this way:
Let us learn that we can never be lonely or forsaken in this life. Shall they forget us because they now have power to love us more? If we forget them not, shall they not remember us with god? No trial, then, can isolate us, no sorrow can cut us off from the Communion of Saints. Kneel down, and you are with them; lift up your eyes, and the heavenly world, high above all perturbation, hangs serenely overhead; only a thin veil, it may be, floats between. All whom we loved, and all who loved us, whom we still love no less, while they love us yet more, are ever near, because ever in His presence in whom we live and dwell.
Sound familiar? The power of such cosmic reciprocity is at the very heart of the Lord’s restored gospel, as said the Prophet Joseph Smith:
And now, I ask, how righteousness and truth are to sweep the earth as a flood? I will answer. Men and angels are to be co-workers in bringing to pass this great work. History of the Church 2:260
And from the Prophet’s nephew, Joseph F. Smith:
When messengers are sent to minister to the inhabitants of this earth, they are not strangers, but from the ranks of our kindred and friends. . . . In like manner, our fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends who have passed away from this earth, having been faithful, and worthy to enjoy these rights and privileges, may have a mission given to them to visit their relatives and friends upon the earth again, bringing from the divine Presence messages of love, of warning, or reproof and instruction, to those who they had learned to love in the flesh.
And from yet another prophet, Moroni:
Behold I say unto you. . .neither have angels ceased to minister unto the children of men. For behold, they are subject unto him, to minister according to the word of his command, showing themselves unto them of strong faith and a firm mind in every form of godliness. . .Has the day of miracles ceased? Or have angels ceased to appear unto the children of men? Or has he withheld the power of the Holy Ghost from them? Or will he, so long as time shall last, or the earth shall stand, of there shall be one man upon the face thereof to be saved? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for it is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that angels appear and minister unto men. . . Moroni 7:29,30, 36, 37
Saints are found the world over. And angels, over the world. Together, they are the seen and unseen beings who, from within or without this realm, serve its inhabitants by mediating God’s love for his children. Saints resemble angels as they earnestly emulate Christ, hence one special early Christian title for church members, isangelos, which means, “equal to angels”.
Two years and one day after standing alone on that bridge on All Saint’s Day, one such isangelos accompanied me to the English Garden. She was an older German sister whose life story read like a staggering litany of abuse, abandonment, loss, grief, chronic illness and loneliness. I was her visiting teacher, and whenever I sat in her modest apartment far out in the countryside where she lived in virtual isolation, she would quietly ask about our son and his life. She was happy to learn that our family had erected a memorial bench to him in Munich’s English Garden. Happy, but also determined to press through her physical debilitations so she could ride the hour with me into town, walk the 30 minutes arm-in-arm with me into the garden, and sit side-by-side with me on my son’s commemorative bench. (That bench faces, by the way, the very canal and the very bridge where I had stood on that bitter All Saints’ Day in 2007).
We sat on that bronze-plaqued bench together. One Saint. One Soul. The intimacy of that moment seemed to transform the world, overfilling that Soul with such gratitude, she spilled into poetry, whose lines are found below.
In Amber
Ezekiel 1: 4-7
Im Englischen Garten
München, November 2009, Allerseelen Tag
Für Christa B.
Go straight toward Himmelsreich,
turn right into Paradies
cross into the tunnel upholstered in
the gingered patina of brocaded taffeta.
Tread the suede elegance of fallen flames,
bind to your soles these hieroglyphs of silence
which draw you deep into muted fluorescence.
You are rapt.
You are in amber
Or Bernstein, burned stone born of
interior clefts in injured trees.
You are in resin,
that umber ooze of congealed spirit
spilling out of hurting hollows.
You are lured,
captured
You are saved
as were nature’s relics 320 million years ago. . .
Two years ago
(same month, same trees, same branches and tunnel)
this was not the same. I saw only desolation.
Haggard branches scratching for air, cadaverous,
grisly. Gasping their last breath of death.
I walked this sodden altar piled with sacrificial scabs
in elegiac tones
(bruise, gash, decay, corpse)
as the dank air clung to my neck
like ashes and dust.
Since then, no whirlwind nor great cloud nor fire infolding itself.
Just this load of despair like moldering foliage
which has soaked my soil, seeped through sediment,
spread to root, been incorporated
as mineral swell of compost
so that today
this All Souls’ Day
I have grown new ears for flamboyant hymn-singing trees
and eyes for upthrust birded limbs, celebrant and winking
throngs of happy timber
and out of the midst thereof
in the midst of voluptuous shade-fire
I could swear we are captured
every last living thing is enclosed
in this furtive moltenness the color of burnished brass
so that all things are present,
preserved in amber.
************************************************************************************
QUESTIONS:
What makes a Saint?
Who do you know (did you know) that embodies/embodied those qualities?
How do you commemorate deceased saints or thank the living ones?
What are your experiences with the “Communion of Saints”? How or when have you sensed heaven and earth touching shoulders or even working in tandem?
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