I think of my granddaddy every year as we approach All Saints' Day because that's the day he died. Oh, by now his name joins a whole host of others who have marked and made me who I am, but he is the one who inevitably comes to mind first. He'll have been gone around forty year now.
I visit his grave from time to time when I'm in Chattanooga --- it overlooks Chickamauga Lake, which is a lake caused by Franklin Roosevelt and the TVA which was caused by flooding my grandaddy's family's land...something my grandaddy never quite got over.
There are a lot of Hixsons (his family), and there and some Kings and Lees. And then there are the Shropshires. Or as my grandaddy would say, “Those people.” They are the ones who held a family reunion in the field next to the cemetery when I was a kid. I remember it well as it was raided by the FBI on the hunt for one of the Shropshire boys who was somehow involved in counterfeiting and bootlegging. He wasn't there at the time, and you could sense the Hixsons all feel scandalized, and the Shropshires all feel a little bit proud, and I reckon that's just how family was in the weird, old South.
Nowadays when I visit I expect that if Grandaddy could talk he'd say, “These Shropshires here still haven't improved a lick, but you know, that lake is kinda beautiful, and people do seem to love it. So, I guess Roosevelt can be forgiven.” And all would be right.
But I have to say, when I'm there, I never go with the expectation of anything more that just dredging up old memories. Even so, there are times in a cemetery when I get a glimmer of just what miracles might occur – a reunion of sorts.
So it was that when I was new in these parts I found myself dreaming of him again --- it happens still, from time to time. Now these have not yet been dreams with big messages or especially startling moments – just ordinary snapshots of life which perhaps repeated themselves a thousand times in those years when he was alive. Times that I didn't pay much attention to then, but, who knows, maybe I did and didn't realize it?
This is how this particular dream played out. I was sitting at the formica kitchen table talking to my grandma while she was cutting okra. Suddenly in walked my grandaddy as alive and energetic as he ever was before his stroke. I looked up to say 'hey' and he came over to me, laughing, and leaned down and pressed his hands against my face. And his hands were cold because he'd been outside working in the shed on a chilly October morning.
I woke up a few moments later feeling that cold on my cheek. It wasn't long before I realized that what I felt was probably the cool October breeze coming through a window that had worked its way open, but in those first waking moments, I couldn't be sure, not really.
I wonder whenever we have dreams like that --- I wonder what happens to cause us to dream of ones we have loved in such a way that seems so very real. Are they so ingrained in our memories --- in the very cells of our brains perhaps --- that now and then it's just like breathing that they are there again?
Or is it something that happened the day before that brings them to mind again?
Or is it something going on in our lives, and we are yearning for that reminder of safety and security that those people were for us as long as they lived?
Or is it, as I do believe, simply the certainty that those that we have loved and who have died, are held still in God's tender care, and so never really leave us?
Still as wonderful as those sorts of dreams can be – and as real as they may still seem in our first waking moments – they are nothing compared to the promise of God on this Sunday, a promise that life doesn't just end – poof – but only changes. That brief sensation of my grandaddy's cold hands on my face? Only a faint shadow of the promise of life again with Jesus.
All Saints Day is for all of this and more. It is, of course, for remembering those who have gone before --- whose memories still enliven our dreams from time to time. But it's not only for that. All Saints Day is for celebrating all those saints around us now. All those people, sitting right here who do those day to day things to keep the world from crumbling in around us. Those people we see every day.
The druggists, the doctors, the police officers. The people working at the post office. The truckers that keep me up at night going down Main Street.
And all y'all. All those you don't even see because they remain blurry and in the background. Fixing the plumbing, caring for the graveyard, arranging food for receptions, leading others in our prayers. Keeping me on the straight and narrow.
All those things they do that if we said “thank you” to them every time, then “thank you” would be all we'd ever get a chance to say. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
And All Saints Day is also for celebrating what is yet to come. It is for all those yet to come and all those who are yet to join in the body of Christ. Because if the promise of Christ is anything, it is hope in a better world, and the belief that we, each of us have a part in it.
And the greatest gift we can give the world is raising up other people to take this hope from us and carry it forward. One person at a time, bringing others out of their graves of loneliness and alienation and fear, and walking with them.
That's what our baptismal vows are all about. That's what our baptismal covenant calls us to do. To make saints and to live like saints.
Because ultimately the Feast of All Saints asks us to stand still in the promise of eternal life that is meant for all of us, for all God's Holy Ones. Oh, I expect we'll always go to cemeteries and hang out a bit with our memories.
At the same time, you and I are called to live our entire lives in the hopeful expectation that one day there will be even more than memories for them and for us and for all we have so loved.
And between now and when that hope is realized --- perhaps we'll have cool breezes in the night, and crazy family in the day – gifts of God in a way – to remind us of the promise of life and love, safety and joy, wonder and hope that, by God's grace, belongs to us all.