Today’s Daily Wonder is by Rev. John Auer. Thanks, John!

Thought for the Day: All Saints

By our baptisms we acknowledge, in Christ we have died our deaths – precisely so we may live with them now! The powers of death have done their worst. Yet, we find ourselves so surrounded, so protected, so comforted, so inspired, so sanctified, and so sustained by the life and the witness, in word and in deed, of that Great Company of those who go on before us. Through them, even in fear we find faith; even in fear, we find love. Even in the midst of All Hallows Eve, we find All the Saints. Even in death, we find life.
 
We who make even an uneasy peace with our fears of death grow freer to stand for life – freer to renounce and resist all terribly tragic misrepresentation, all misuse of death in this world. We hurt, we destroy; we exploit, we abuse; we persecute, we oppress; we cripple the very being of Earth Herself.
 
It may even be all we Christians are, finally, good for. It may be all we are honor bound to contribute to dialogue with other faiths, or with no-faiths: From the one we call Savior, Lord, and from his saints, we learn, not to kill, but to die. We learn, not to remain in control all the time, but to live out our own lives in faith, to end – no matter how few, how weak, how distraught.
 
For in Christ we are called more to faithfulness than to success – to know what, and whom, we believe; who we are, and to whom we belong; where we come from, and where we are going – no matter what happens to us, around us, along the way. For, in the end, the saints are, necessarily, those with nothing to show for ourselves but our faith, the stock, and the stuff, of our lives.
 
This is how Preacher Casy, at the graveside of Grampa Joad, says it in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath –
 
This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ jus’ died out of it. I don’t know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says “All that lives is holy.” Got to thinkin’, an’ purty soon it means more than the words says. An’ I wouldn’ pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright. He’s got a job to do, but it’s all laid out for ‘im an’ there’s on’y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an’ they’s a thousan’ ways, an’ we don’t know which one to take. An’ if I was to pray, it’d be for the folks that don’t know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An’ now cover ‘im up an’ let him get to his work.