There is a deep paradox in the way of Jesus. At its heart, it is a way of grace over law, a way of unconditional love and radical acceptance. But he also tells us this way will cost us everything, beginning with our impulses toward self-preservation and our need for security above all else. The liberating, world healing, abundant life of Jesus demands making our peace with these risky lives we’ve been given, and not giving them over to fear. Or, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, “Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.”
Covenant inherently means there are separations and divisions that need to be knit back together. We can see this in our personal and communal journeys, especially when we try to move forward without God. We can see this in our national life, where we as the Church are called to be the voice of unity, civility, service, understanding, healing, hope, peace, and love.
The feast of All Saints, I think, is meant to go to work on the hearts of Christian people in a number of ways. One is that it’s meant to expand our bubbles by expanding the bubble our definition of the Church lives within. Another is to see the Church, and by extension, all of humanity, as a living, growing, emergent, interconnected whole, of which any one of us is a tiny, but utterly unique and essential part. The communion of saints is vast and old and wondrous and awful at times, and it would be sadly incomplete if it didn’t include you.
Sometimes I hear “love” used as a panacea; e.g., just add love and it’ll be better. I think anyone who has spent any time in a family with others understands the demands and complications and sacrifices of real love. I’m always suspicious when love looks like the path of least resistance, when it’s easy on us, when it’s easy for us. Anything worth doing is difficult, and if love is the thing most worth doing, it does follow that it would be the most difficult.
You see, sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to be put in your place. For many of us, the orbits of our lives have gotten so much smaller over the past months. We feel so much less in control of what we can do and where we can go. Our hurts and our flaws seem to surface more quickly and stand out more starkly on the small stages of our coronavirus lives. It all takes its toll. But grace doesn’t work by giving us greater control over our lives and our world or by making our sins and anxieties and unhelpful habits just go away. No, sometimes grace goes to work on us by locating us. By saying, “You are small, and you are broken, but you are here. In all this beautiful vastness that belongs ultimately only to God, all of who you are is part of all this too.”