Feast of All Saints
The Gospel appointed for All Saints disrupts our somewhat continuous reading in Matthew's Gospel. We jump back to the Sermon on the Mount, and hear again what are known as The Beatitudes (from the Latin for the word 'Blessed') -- blessed are all sorts of people whom the crowd doubtless does not usually think of as being 'blessed.'
We generally use the word to mean that someone has had something good or extraordinary happen to them -- in common parlance, I mean. "You are so blessed to have such good health!" "We are so blessed to have such lovely weather today." Things not really of our own choosing. Our friends from the southern USA use this word euphemistically -- 'well, bless his little heart' -- to mean quite the opposite of that word!
We can offer -- or withhold! -- blessing to one another. But, it's not primarily 'good wishes' we offer (though that can be part of it). I think of the word's meaning as it shows up in Galway Kinnell's poem St Francis and the Sow, where Francis places his hand on a pig to "...re-teach a thing its loveliness."
To bless something is to participate in its coming to fullness, to flower, to becoming what it is meant to be in the fullness of God's time, God-who-is-Love.
This is why we name the dead this day, and continue to participate in their coming to fullness among us, in the life of God. For, "...to God, they are all alive," as Jesus tells us, and they - and we, and all created things - are coming ever more fully alive.
So, blessed are the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, those reviled on account of their speaking the truth-in-love of God, the merciful... for they bring us all ever more fully alive in God. It is in these places in us -- poverty, mercy, truth-speaking, peacemaking... -- that God can work, and move, and transform.
Luke's Gospel pairs the 'blessed' list with a 'woe to you' list -- and, it's not only some 'threat.' Rather, in the places where the self-satisfied live and move, thinking that they have it all and that the universe is a steady-state place without change... there, God has little space to work, as there is little room made. There is no room for blessing.
Matthew's Gospel doesn't make this contrast plain here, although that strong image later on in Matthew of the sheep and the goats at some storied final judgement -- that approximates the same thing. 'Lord, when was it that we saw you thus and did not take care of you?' When were our hearts too hard?
When we let there be space for God, when we admit that we are of the poor of this earth, then we glimpse or enter the kingdom of God; when we are merciful, then are we able to receive mercy, all around us. And, then we become a blessing, bringing part of creation to greater fullness-of-being.
We participate in the blessedness and the blessing of those around us, particularly when we, like Francis in that story and poem, participate in re-teaching something its loveliness. Here is how that poem begins:
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing
Go, read it all. You'll see what I mean. A paradox for all our days.