Beloved Members of St. Martin’s,
This weekend we will celebrate All Saints and All Souls Day. Those saints are the “hallows” from which Halloween gets its name. Yes, Halloween literally means “the Eve before All Saints’ Day.”
Once again, I want to encourage you to be in attendance, because Denise and the choir have put together some fabulous music, meant to uplift our souls, especially in this time of anxiety as we approach Election Day here in the US.
One of my favorite hymns will close out our worship on Sunday: “I Sing A Song of the Saints of God.” Like “They Will Know We Are Christians,” this is one of the very first songs I remember singing as a very small child.
As Denise explains in her music notes for this week, the author of this hymn is Lesbia Leslie Scott born in 1896 in Willesden, London (nee Lockett). She married a captain in the British military who later became a priest in the Church of England. As a vicar’s wife, she wrote pageants and also children’s hymns, many of which she sang to her young children as a young mother.
I love this hymn’s imagery: some saints were doctors, or shepherdesses, queen, even fighters of “fierce wild beasts.” And I loved—and still love its central message, which is summed up in the final verse:
They lived not only in ages past; there are hundreds of thousands still; the world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus’ will. You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea; for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.
This was an important message for me, as I grew up in the Methodist faith in my earliest years, so we didn’t talk much about saints, per se. When several years later I discovered the Episcopal Church, I loved our approach to saints. Sure, we recognized all the ones from the Roman church. But we also counted people outside Catholicism as saints, people like David Oakerhater and Martin Luther King Jr., Peter and Annie Cassey, Florence Perkins, Florence Li Tom-Oi, and C. S. Lewis.
And so we remember that saints are not only people who perform amazing miracles—although I still love St. Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of astronauts who levitated and flew around his church. But saints are regular folk, making their way through the world led by the light of Christ, who attempt to form their lives as illuminations of the Way of Jesus in the world, in ways small as well as great. People who are generous in spirit, dedicated to love of God and neighbor, and who live lives that bring honor to the Name of Christ, even if imperfectly but always with determination.
Especially in this time, let us remember that we are ALL called to be saints of God, and may we mean to each be one too in all we do.
In Christ,
Mother Leslie+