The Thinnest of Veils - All Souls 2022

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of All Souls Day, November 2, 2022 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

This evening, we gather–in heaven or on earth I know not which–to celebrate the Feast of All Souls. It’s a time to offer up prayers for the departed, to remember those who have walked before, and touch upon the bedrock of our life–the steadfast, faithfulness and trustworthiness of God companioning us through thick and thin, good times and bad, sickness and health, in life and in death.

It’s easy, of course, for this day to stray into metaphysical speculation about the exact shape of the life to come. As you know, there is no shortage of elaborately graded architectonics spelling out what heaven looks like (usually featuring a little too much gilt, filigree, mirrors, and overstuffed neo-Victorian furniture for my taste.) Rowan Williams writes of this human, all-too-human impulse in his gem of a book Tokens of Trust:

Our imaginations set to work and we produce pictures of the new world, the world we’d really like to live in; only they seem so often to produce only embarrassing clichés. Look at those pictures of the new heaven and new earth that you sometimes see in the glossy publications of some religious sects that claim to explain the real meaning of the Bible to you: the painful truith is that they can’t help looking like holiday brochures of the naffest variety (140).

Rather than dwelling upon these glossy, hopelessly speculative castles-in-air (which are after all mere  human constructions), what if we turned instead, dwelled instead, learned to abide and rest with quiet trust in, the goodness and mercy of the God who refuses to let us go, so precious are we in God’s sight? 

So-called “Anglican Reserve,” can easily be misunderstood as mere waffling about tough questions, when in reality it is born of taking the first and second commandments with utter seriousness–”You shall have no Gods before me… you shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath…. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” Empty-handed, child-like trust, like an infant upon her mother’s breast is enough. More than enough. Surrendering to love, waiting for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning we come to know in a way the glossy brochures can’t depict that, yes, with the Lord there is mercy, plenteous redemption where nothing is lost, left behind. Even our sins, the most egregious things of which our conscience is afraid, touched by purifying fire of grace are transfigured, as Fr. Robert Capon writes, into “glorious scars.”

So this day, ultimately, gestures away from human fantasy and towards the bedrock reality and trustworthiness of ever more intimate relationship with God who goes to every length–including death on the cross–to show us that nothing (not death, not life, not angels, not principalities, not powers, not things present, not things to come, not height, not depth, not nothing) can separate us from God’s love. Time and again, across the scriptures, we encounter the God who comes to us in the depth of our need, sorrow, lostness, and grief and tabernacles in us, with us, for us–“See, the home of God is among mortals” (Rev. 21:3). Think of Elijah–fresh on the heels of being provisioned with the widow of Zarephath and her son for days--no, weeks!--on just oil jug dregs and a handful of  meal–sitting under the broom tree, declaring all is lost,  about ready to throw in the towel. “Not so fast, Eli,” says the Angel of the Lord, “Get up and eat!” Again and again we wander far away and again again God calls to return, runs out to greet us while we are yet far off with robes, and rings and fatted calves. Again and again we learn, slowpokes that we are, it is in returning and rest, in quietness and trust, that our safety, our salvation, our healing, our wholeness, our homecoming is in God touched and tasted. “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.”

Again and again scripture shows us this faithful, trustworthy God who kneels down in the midst of our various nights to feed us, and wash us–towel tied about his waist–with mercy and love. Again and again God comes to us in the humble elements that God has made and human hands have formed–this very bread and wine God’s body, God’s blood. Again and again God comes to us in the midst of this so-called ordinary life (whether on earth or in heaven I know not which) like sparks running through the stubble of our daily round, like “shining from shook foil,” in ten thousand faces and places. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

These tokens of trust, re-minders of the trustworthiness of God, surround us at every turn. It is not God who is absent, but we, says Meister Eckhart, who are so often off on errands. Jeffrey Bilbro writes in a lovely little piece on the Anglican priest and poet R.S. Thomas, “our besetting sin is hurry, and the remedy is to turn aside.” He’s speaking, of course, of Thomas’ poem “The Bright Field”:

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Right here, in every common bush, all the blessed assurance we could ever need. In being gathered and recollected from our various dispersions, in stopping, in seeing, in turning aside and taking off our thick-soled shoes, in shedding, laying gently, ever so gently, aside our preoccupations and fanciful projections, in being stripped bare of thought’s hall of mirrors, we come to taste and see, to touch, to encounter love, actually–the One who was and is and is to come. “My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” Mercy. Mercy and plentious redemption. Indeed.

We think, as 21st century heirs of Descartes, that the blessed assurance for which we yearn, that so vexes our little brains, will come to us in the acquisition of new, or better, information about God rather than in union and communion with God. But thought, mere thinking, cannot reach it. Si comprehende non Deus est. “If you can think it, it’s not God,” quips an impatient Augustine. The same fellow, I might add, who, while he was writing his treatise on the Holy Trinity, had a dream about a child ladling water from the ocean with a seashell into a hole he’d dug in the sand. “What are you doing?” Augustine asks. “I’m trying to scoop up the whole ocean and put it in this hole.” “That’s impossible.” “Indeed,’ says the child, “but I will sooner draw all the water from the sea and empty it into this hole than you will succeed in penetrating the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your limited understanding.”

Prayer teaches us this. We come to know, to rest in, the One Who doesn’t wax and wane, the One Who doesn’t blow this way and that like everything else. Beyond and beneath those gently shed thoughts, words, images, a Living Presence still and dancing holding it all in a gifted economy of love in which nothing is lost, nothing forgotten. We learn to leave the glossy brochures to the glossy brochure makers and  relax back in simple, trusting, child-like confidence in the love of God who, “will not let us go even on the far side of death.”  It’s not so much that our questions and doubts get answered as they in a strange way cease to have such a grabby hold on us. 

Our poet companion on the way R.S. Thomas has this to say about it–this earth or heaven I know not which:

May it not be that alongside us, made invisible by the thinnest of veils, is the heaven we seek? The immortality we must put on? Some of us, like Frances Thompson, know moments when “Those shaken mists a space unsettle” (“The Hounds of Heaven”). To a countryman it is the small field suddenly lit up by a ray of sunlight. It is T. S. Eliot’s “still point, there the dance is” (“Four Quartets”), Wordsworth’s “central peace, subsisting at the heart of endless agitation” (“The Excursion”). It is even closer. It is within us, as Jesus said. That is why there is no need to go anywhere from here.

No need to go anywhere from here. The easeful remedy for hurry in this graced turning aside. Just the thinnest of veils between us and the blessed caught-up-in-the-cloud-together company of the saints in light. The trumpet’s call in the crosswalk chirp, in the sputtering wren’s tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, teet.