ALL SAINTS DAY

copied from Richard Rohr:
Question of the Day:
What am I dying to little by little?

All religions in their own way talk about “dying before you die”! They are all indeed saying that something has to die. We all know this, but often religions have chosen the wrong thing to kill, which has given us a very negative image. In almost all history it was always the “other,” the heretic, the sinner, the foreigner that had to die.

In most ancient cultures it was the virgin daughters and eldest sons that had to be “sacrificed;” in Biblical times it was an animal, as we see in the Jewish temple. By the Christian Middle Ages, it was our desires, our intellect, our bodies, and our will that had to die; which made many people think that God had created something wrong in us. Religion then became purity/separation codes instead of transformational systems.

Jesus did say very clearly that we had to “lose our self to find our self” in several different settings. For much of Christian history this was interpreted as the body self that had to die, and for some miraculous reason this was supposed to make the spiritual self arise! It did not work, and it allowed us to avoid the real problem. What really has to die is our false self created by our own mind, ego, and culture. It is a pretense, a bogus identity, a passing fad, a psychological construct that gets in the way of who we are and always were—in God. This is the objective and metaphysical True Self.

It seems we all live with a tragic case of mistaken identity. Christianity’s most important job is to tell you that you indeed and already have a True Self, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3-4). If we but knew this—every day would be “all saints day”!

Adapted from On Transformation: Collected Talks, Volume I (CD):
“Dying, We Need It For Life”

Current Mantra:
Lord, teach me to choose life.

AND, this copied from Upper Room Daily reflections:
THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS can be more than just a doctrine as we imaginatively entertain the saints’ stories and presence among the heavenly host. …

I delight in praying the daily office in company with Charles Wesley, Mary Magdalene, Polycarp, John Donne, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and many more. Their persistence in holy practices encourages me, and they remind me that God did not stop raising up great holy men and women with the close of the New Testament. They prompt me to believe in what God seeks to do in changing me from sinner to saint. If they lived out their baptism in daily life; then so can we! In living with and praying with the saints, our sense of the communion of saints becomes a rich treasury of stories and a participation in a community of the living and the dead.

- Daniel T. Benedict, Jr.
Patterned by Grace: How Liturgy Shapes Us

From pages 53-54 of Patterned by Grace: How Liturgy Shapes Us by Daniel T. Benedict, Jr. Copyright © 2007 by the author


In the worship services today we will be reading 15 names in the Memorial Roll.
They too, are in our communion of saints.