All Saints

This coming Sunday is observed as All Saints Sunday: the Sunday set aside to remember those who have gone before us in the Christian faith, and to reflect on their service and faithfulness. As one hymn puts it,
For all your saints, O Lord,
who strove in you to live,
who followed you, obeyed, adored
our grateful hymn receive.

For all your saints, O Lord,
who strove in you to die,
who counted you their great reward,
accept our thankful cry.

They all in life and death,
with you, their Lord, in view
learned from your Holy Spirit's breath
to suffer and to do.


Now, as a Lutheran liturgical musician, I'm well-used to following the church year... the highs & lows, busy seasons and fallow seasons, festivals and ordinary Sundays. Reformation Sunday followed by All Saints Sunday, usually with a time change thrown in.

But this year is different.
This year All Saints is difficult.

Within the last eight days, two deaths have touched our family: my wife's childhood best-friend's father died. He had been in a lingering condition for many months, and while the death wasn't a surprise, the timing was. And of course the childhood connection makes it harder, too.

The other death was more shocking. Perhaps you'd call it "biological misadventure" if you felt like inventing a legalistic-sounding term. To put it shortly: she was 31 and expecting her third child. She would have been giving birth in the next few weeks, and instead, due to a ruptured organ, she is deceased. The infant may survive: it's unclear now whether he will or not.

So, with two significant deaths near to my family in the last week, of course All Saints would be difficult this year. But here are the wrinkles: (1) My wife, her friend, and her friend's father are Jewish. (2) His death came long after a stroke which had caused major neurological damage. (3) I have no idea the faith (if any) of the woman who died before childbirth... or that of her family...

So questions arise, and they aren't easy:

How, on All Saints Sunday, do we remember and celebrate the lives of those of other faiths?

How, on any Sunday, do we casually sing "they learned... to suffer and to do" when, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, suffering can be replaced by lingering, the patient neither alive nor dead?

As for what I'll do this Sunday, I'll do what I always do... my best impression of being a "professional" while leading the bells, and the band, and the choir... and perhaps I'll light a pair of candles to remember two saints who weren't saints of the church.