All Saints’ Day: Grieving the Year’s Losses

*Picture by Gemma Chua-Tran on Unsplash

When I lived in Philadelphia, I spent All Saints’ Day at my 300-year-old church just down the street from my apartment. My church’s accumulation of years seemed especially appropriate for this holy day—a day to gather and remember all the saints and martyrs, known and unknown, who have died.

Each year, I walked through my neighborhood feeling the seasonal bite in the air; summer’s humidity was slipping away, leaving me to face into the long cold winter. I passed through my church’s graveyard, stones marking lives that once brought vibrancy to our centuries old community. Leaves were both rife with color on trees and drying on the ground. Entering into the sanctuary, I was warmly received by dim lights and friendly greetings. As I settled into a hard edged pew, I could feel the nearness of fellow congregants, spanning all ages, as well as a whisper of those who had gone before me.

During the liturgies participants named God’s faithful recorded in the scriptures all the way to the every day saints, and unsettled souls, who departed over the last year. I found comfort in hearing the saints’ names listed alongside one another, as if the deceased were not alone in transitioning into eternity. Hearing their names gave me a sense that I also am not alone, but surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses from antiquity to now. I am supported by their trail-blazing legacy, and I can draw on their wisdom to guide me.

This year my observance of All Saints’ Day will look different, as so many things do. I will observe this holy day in the solitude of quarantine. The saints I name will include the over one million people who have died from COVID-19. Black lives violently taken (at least weekly in the U.S. during 2020) from police brutality. The hundreds of deaths at the Mexican border, including children who died while separated from their families. And I will mourn the countless ambiguous losses of, not only people, but my long held beliefs about reality.

My church’s service in Philadelphia met a need I believe we all have—a structure to contain the messy emotion of grief, language to articulate what is difficult to say, and a community to provide support in individual and collective loss. Today, I am reminded that whether in a church or in my home, I am not seeking to meet this need alone. Through our union in God we are still sharing in one another’s losses. Together, we are a great cloud of witnesses, spanning life ages, and geographies, and centuries. We are held, collectively, in Divine love—your name exists alongside mine, and your loved ones, and all those who have died, now and in eternity.