Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

…That they may go from strength to strength

+ In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

ll Saints is an exclusively Western celebration. Originally it commemorated the rededication of the ancient Pantheon in Rome as the Church of All Saints, but it became really popular in colder climates to the north, where it superseded (or was conflated with) heathen observances of the change of season and harvest. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in Minnesota usually get to experience the full drama of this natural background, because it’s often the last of the beautiful weather, and we know that the general death of Winter will be starting any day.

So, it’s a good time for a harvest festival – and All Saints’ is the Church’s celebration of the spiritual harvest; the ingathering of the saints into the heavenly storehouse. Well, at least that’s one way of looking at it: saints are those who have made it safely home, where they will stay, like the corn, stored away in God’s blissful barn forever.

It’s a static image – sanctity as a status or condition or quality of being – because that’s how people thought, by and large, in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. You were born in a particular place, and there you died. Meanwhile, you occupied a particular place – or station – in society, and you stayed put. You did what your mother or father did, and you didn’t move. You grew up, you grew old, and you died, but that was the only change you experienced. If you lived your time well, you could expect a new state of perfect bliss in an unchanging heaven (after the refining process of purgatory, where life’s spiritual changes continued, as necessary, for a certain period of time, in order to render you fit for the Vision of God and the changeless bliss of eternity in the state of perfection or completeness.) No further progress or change, you would have become all you could be and you would be that forever.

Even later on, in the High Middle Ages, when people began to move around more, going on pilgrimages and crusades, the spiritual significance of these journeys was the destination, where some benefit was expected – usually having to do with shortening the period of refinement you would have to undergo after death, before you were admitted to the eternal Presence of God.

But there is another way of thinking about sanctity – less popular, but more ancient – holiness as a process instead of a state, sanctity imagined as a procession that never ends. The ancient hope is echoed in the Prayerbook petition for the “continual growth” of the dead. This was the mystical teaching of one of the greatest of the Church fathers, Gregory of Nyssa. In addition to contributions of inestimable importance to our adoration of God as Trinity, St. Gregory advanced the idea of eternal life as an unending journey. God is infinite, and we are finite, he reasoned. We are invited to share more and more of the Divine Life, but we can never take it all in. We are created to become more and more like God, but we can never be God’s equal, we can never be the perfect image of God. But we can approach ever nearer.

Our conception and experience of God changes and grows as we do, and that growth in the life to come, in ways unimaginable to us now ~ just as unimaginable as the faith and knowledge of an adult is unimaginable to a little child. As we progress, our capacity for love and joy increases as we become more and more like God; but at the same time, our apprehension of God’s infinite Personhood enlarges. As we grow capable of more and more joy, we know the majesty of God more and more, and know ourselves to be those little children, in comparison, as the Lord says we must be in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The paradox is that the larger we become, the smaller we feel. But this sense of our own nothingness is not a sorrow, but a joy, as we are drawn ever higher into the light, “unto ages of ages”, as the Eastern Liturgy puts it.

In this way of thinking, sanctity is not a state we reach, but the journey itself. The Apostolic Community called itself “The Way” and its members “the saints”. They were holy in the Hebrew sense of being set apart, but what set them apart was the fact that they were on a journey. Early Christian art often depicted the Church as a procession, and our own liturgical processions may be invested with this symbolism, too.

We are on a journey to God together – a journey that has no end. We wind around the room in a ceremonial dance. We stop along the way, but then we keep on going. We arrive at a banquet, a wedding feast – in other words at a celebration of new life and life incessantly renewed and magnified, where we receive nourishment for the ongoing journey that, as we pray for the dead, we “increasing in knowledge and love of thee … may go from strength to strength, and attain to the fulness of joy in thy heavenly kingdom.”

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!