"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