For All the Saints?: Remembering the Christian Departed by N.T. Wright

Author:N.T. Wright
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9780819226044
Published: 2004-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

3

All Saints, All Souls and

All That

More is less: the perils of a double

commemoration

This third chapter narrows the focus. Several mainstream churches observe occasions like ‘All Saints’ Day’ and, in some cases, ‘All Souls’ Day’. How can we order our liturgies so that they reflect and celebrate the deep Christian truths we’ve been examining?

The last two churches where I have worked, in common with many others in England and around the world, have organized a ‘Commemoration of All Souls’ each 2 November. After attending several of these annual events, I got to the point a few years ago where I decided that, in conscience, I could do so no longer. The commemoration makes all the wrong points. Worse: its very existence pulls All Saints’ itself out of shape. By adding an extra commemoration, you diminish the original one: more is less. Let me explain, with the help of a recent Anglican publication which offers, at a popular level, an apparent rationale for the new practice.

In 1991 there appeared a little book entitled The Promise of His Glory (Church House Publishing and Mowbray, 1991). It suggests prayers and readings for the period from All Saints’ (1 November) to Candlemas (2 February). In almost all respects I find this, like some similar volumes, extremely helpful and worthwhile. But at this point I find it lets me down with a bump. In the explanatory introduction the book asserts that All Souls’ Day ‘is a proper corrective to the rather forced jollity which is sometimes substituted for a sober confidence in the power of God alone to bring life out of death, light in our darkness’. It suggests that ‘Many people are helped by holding together these two commemorations’ of All Saints and All Souls (p. 5). It later acknowledges the danger in assuming that the dead can be parcelled out into neat categories, but says:

psychologically and liturgically, there is a need for a day that is seen to be about our own departed, rather than the heroes of the faith, and that acknowledges human grief and fragility in a way that would hardly find a place when we celebrate the triumphs of the great ones on All Saints’ Day. (p. 47)

I regard these arguments as based on thin air, advancing by illegitimate steps and reaching unwarranted conclusions. Is the Anglican church really in danger of ‘forced jollity’? I’d like to see it! Forced solemnity would describe many Anglican services much better. And if the answer is ‘well, there are those churches where people wave their hands in the air and shout Hallelujah’, the reply is obvious: they probably don’t celebrate All Saints, and they certainly won’t be commemorating All Souls. And if people do find the two days helpful, and I am aware that many may do, I respectfully suggest that that is because we have collectively forgotten just what a wonderful thing the gospel is: that ‘our own departed’ are themselves ‘heroes of the faith’ just as much as Peter, Paul, Mary, James, John and the rest.

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