All Saints Day

           Last Sunday was glorious! Blessing our pledges together at the offertory was special and meaningful. Blessing and dedicating the fountain and the new plaque in the pollinator garden as signs among us of Mrs. Brown’s Big Dream show us the meaning and purpose of our pledges and tell us that we all belong. Later Sunday afternoon, basking in the happy memory of our great day of church, I listened to the latest episode of David Brooks’s new podcast series, The Permanent Questions, a co-production of Yale and The Atlantic Magazine. Brooks is one of my very favorite faithful Jewish Episcopalians, and you can hear him preach from time to time at The National Cathedral. 

           Last Sunday’s episode was a conversation with Carlos Eire, a Yale historian of religion who came to the US from Havana through Operation Pedro Pan when he was 11, winning the National Book Award with the story of his experience, Waiting for Snow in Havana. Brooks and Eire were talking about our deep human need for meaning, and for ways to express, and consider, important questions. Eire’s personal experience of loss and dislocation gives his words great weight. Without a sense of ultimate meaning, says Eire, the world will try to re-enchant itself — in other words, to try to add back mystery, wonder, and unexplain-ability to a scientific or quantitative world. 

           What Eire is getting at, I think, is that our hearts, souls, and feelings are bigger than our minds. I think this is why music, art, dance, literature, and poetry can express — and help us to experience — our biggest wonders, needs, marvels, loves, losses, and even fears. Theology incorporates all of those art forms, including scripture itself — the story of our human experiences over time with God. Artistic expression of all kinds is the soul of theology — a way to express and consider relationships, causations, contexts, and legacies that are the very humanity of our past, present, and future. Science may be able to identify and list the features of our lives and experience, but exploring the meaning and purpose imbedded there takes art and metaphor — like the metaphors and signs we read in scripture. 

           This is true even in a completely scientific environment. In response to Eire’s observation that a world without a sense of ultimate meaning will try to re-enchant itself, David Brooks refers to the tech religion of Silicon Valley: They worship a god, Brooks says, which is intelligence. They believe in sin, which is inefficiency. They believe in moral progress, which is optimization of efficiency. And they believe in eternal life, which is transhumanism — you can download your brain onto a computer and live forever. They’ve got it all going on, Brooks continues, even though they would deny that they are religious.

           We should notice — especially in this time of rapid AI and technology development —that our human need for ultimate meaning and purpose is so strong that we naturally seek to find these forms even when science and technology purport to take their place. Duke and Brown are making liberal arts departments a priority again after some strategic cost-cutting measures. Practically, humanities classes promote critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills that can be beneficial in any career. A spiritual perspective gives us the metaphor, nuance, context, culture, and custom that we need to discuss morality, goodness, evil, obedience, free will, personal responsibility, mortality, loss, and all the other Big Questions of being human together. We lose something important  when we don’t consider the power of mystery, and talk about those things that we can’t understand or explain away. We lose that whole other dimension — our visceral, human connection to the past, and all our hope for a future we can’t yet see or understand. We lose the dimension that can give us insight into, and access to, empathy. 

           This is a perfect conversation for All Saints’ Day. The Church answers our longing for ultimate meaning with a vision: John of Patmos looks up and sees a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages… . They will hunger no more, and thirst no more, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. On All Saints’ Day, we remember those we love but see no longer, as our prayer for the dead goes — and John’s Revelation gives us a way to cherish the love that makes human and gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Mourning those we’ve lost this year, and the ones each of us always carries quietly in our hearts, — and repeating that practice generation after generation, century after century — connects us to our past and teaches us how strong and precious love is, engaging our humanity and capacity for loving our neighbor. Mourning allows us to join in the communion of saints, and our beloveds’ lives continue to inform, interpret, and reinterpret ours, building meaning and purpose that is ultimate, and connects us all. 

           Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus says to the assembled crowd in the Sermon on the Mount we read this morning. Since at least the 4th century, the Church has honored a hollow up high under the crest of the fields above that forms a natural amphitheater for an assembled crowd on the shore below as the place where Jesus spoke to us that day. The Roman Catholic Church of the Beatitudes, and the pilgrim house of the Franciscan Sisters of Egypt, farm and manage the site now, producing bananas and dates in the fields above off the road to Capernaum. 

           Blessed are those who mourn. But how can something that hurts so much be a blessing? Mourning blesses us by showing us we belong, and that as we mourn, we will one day be mourned, giving us all a stake in beloved community. In her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson describes radical empathy as putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel in their circumstances. 

           This kind of listening and understanding is not efficient, and Chat GPT, Perplexity, OpenAI, or Claude — or whichever artificial intelligence, super intelligence, or non-human intelligence we might consult — would recommend all kinds of shortcuts to optimize our work. But our human need for ultimate meaning and purpose thrives in the inefficiency of the gospel — the good news for all of us. Blessed are the meek, who don’t tell others how they should think. Blessed are the merciful, who give people another chance without writing others out of their lives. Blessed are those who mourn and cherish the relationships and blessings they’ve had. Blessed are the peacemakers, who can see more than one truth at a time. 

           I’d like to add another: Blessed are the inefficient, because life is messy. While any efficient office worker will tell you — rightly — to handle paper or emails once — that is file it or act on it right away — I think we should handle relationships, and anything that matters, absolutely as much as possible. Mercy is inefficient. Mourning is inefficient. Peacemaking is wildly, gloriously inefficient. So is listening to someone long enough to understand what their life looks like from the inside. Meet difference with curiosity, not suspicion. Ask your neighbor with the other yard sign one question you don’t already know the answer to … and then listen to the answer. Be ready to learn something new. You might even change your mind. Amen