"I Sing a Song of the Saints of God"

Ever since I was a little girl, I have HATED Halloween. It scared me as a child and as an adult, it seems to me to be a celebration of the perversion of goodness. Ghosts, goblins, witches and "things that go bump in the night" are the manifestations of both our fears and our all too human tendencies to yield to temptation and the darker sides of our humanity.

"Halloween" is conflation of what the early Church called "All Hallow's Eve." "Hallow" is an Old English word that means "holy". All Hallows Eve falls the night before the celebration of All Saints' Day. Dressing up as saints or sinners,the early Christian community made visible the struggle between good and evil in the world. As All Saints' Day dawns, Christians remember with love those saints of the faith - both known and unknown - who have gone before us and handed on their examples, their wisdom and their love of God.

While Halloween is my least favorite day of the year, All Saints' is my FAVORITE feast day of the Christian year. All of the other festivals of the Christian year
celebrate the wonderful things God has done for us. All Saints' Day celebrates our response to what God has done for us. As we remember the faithful who have gone before us, we give thanks for their loving response to God, their witness and for the faith they have passed on to us.

We tend to think of the Saint's with capital "S's" - St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Francis - but All Saints' also celebrates the saints with the little "s's," the folks whose lives of faith may be known only to us. In my family, we celebrate All Saints' by placing on our family altar things that remind us of the saints with the little "s's" in our lives: my grandmother's bible, a letter written by a deceased godparent, pictures of the saints who are living among us still. We give thanks to God as a family for the people who help us know and love Jesus.

I invite you and your family to do the same this All Saints' Day. Remember in love your family's saints. And then remember that we, too, are the saints of God, made so at our baptisms - just ordinary human beings transformed through water into God's people. New to the Methodist hymnal, I was delighted to find an old familiar and favorite All Saints' hymn, "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God" - hymn #712. At each refrain, we remember saints of all sorts, "and one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was shepherdess on the green" . . . "and one was a soldier, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast" . . . and one is YOU!

In thanksgiving for the saints among us,
Elizabeth

About This Blog

A cradle Christian, I spoke the language of faith from birth. I have a seminary education and certainly felt comfortable raising my children as Christians. With years of experience as a professional Christian educator under my belt, I was sure that I was up to the challenge of sharing the Christian faith with my children.

So you can imagine my surprise one Palm Sunday when my then eight-year-old elder son piled into the car after Church and said, "Ok, Mom - So who's Hosanna anyway? I get the whole Father, Son and Holy Spirit thing, but just who is this Hosanna person and how come I haven't heard about him before?" Having processed around the Church that day with his palm branch, my son was sure that "Hosanna" was a previously un-named manifestation of the Holy Spirit that for some bizzare reason we had decided to sing about only on this particular Sunday. Rather chagrined, I explained that "Hosanna" is not a person, but rather a Hebrew word meaning "save now" or "please save." We sing it and say it on Palm Sunday to re-enact Jesus' entry into Jerusalem that final Passover before his crucifixion. He seemed satisfied with my answer, but I drove home wondering just what other bits of confusion about his faith he might be musing on - and I was considerably less impressed by my effectiveness in sharing my faith at home!

I share this story because I think all Christian parents - no matter how strong our faith or whether or not we were raised in the Church - have questions about sharing and teaching faith at home. Even if our children regularly attend Sunday School, they have questions they bring only to us. We want to answer them, but we are afraid we might say the wrong thing, or we don't have the "right" answer or we aren't sure about the answer ourselves. This is perfectly normal in the life of a Christian family.

I hope this blog can be a place for us to talk about our questions, to learn together about what it means to make a life of faith as a family and to share the joy and struggles of raising children in the faith. I will post weekly with information about the liturgical seasons, suggestions for activities and prayers to share at home and provide references to websites and books and other media that will help you and your family live a rich life of faith together at home. As you comment and respond, I will get a better sense of what your questions are, of the things that we need more information about and I will know how to better support you and help you support one another as we share the raising of our children in faith as families and as a Church community.

So welcome to this new adventure! Let's enjoy the journey together!

Faithfully.
Elizabeth