All Saints’ 2025
Ephesians 1. 11 – 23; Luke 6. 20 - 31
Fr Marc
May it be given to me to speak to you in the name of God +Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
“The curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head./But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”
This line from Seamus Heaney’s 1966 poem, ‘Digging’ comes to mind for me when I begin to think about the theme of All Saints’, this joyful feast which brings us so triumphantly into the season of remembrance and to thoughts of what is new as well as of what is old, as our minds turn toward Advent and the hope and expectancy of a New Year – and as we bring into that transition all that has gone before, good and bad, done and undone.
Where do you even start if you want to be saintly – holy? “I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” we might agree with Heaney. Or we might say today in line with the common metaphor, ‘I don’t have enough spoons.’ I can only please one person a day: today’s not your day and tomorrow doesn’t look good either!’
I have, and often do, certainly feel like this; I don’t know about you. I wonder how you think of saints and sainthood?
It can be easy just to leave it at the end of Heaney’s stanza: these are people who have formed me and shaped me (in his case his father and grandfather), but I can’t be like them, I can only ‘look down,’ as he says, to where they are doing what they do as they do it, and watch ‘where he was digging … down and down for the good turf.’
Saints are exemplars and role models. But they’re a world apart from me; I couldn’t be like that, and even if I could, I’d go mad keeping it up; I’d drop the spade, fall into sin and have to begin again, knowing and bearing what it had been like – what I had been like before. “I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”
Heaney can handle no spade ‘like his old man,’ to be sure, yet the ‘living roots’ awaken in his head to fruition as it is manifest rather, between his finger and thumb, where the ‘squat pen rests, snug as a gun.’ “I’ll dig with it,” he says in the poem’s final stanza: resignation transposed into the major key of hope and possibility.
It is by memorialising in his unique poetic voice the ordinary, honest effort to procure potatoes, that Heaney paints for us, not only a picture of two saints unique in their own place and time, but shows us also his own awakening to the reality that he is, to quote today’s collect, ‘knit together [with them] in one communion and fellowship.’ So whether he digs with spade or with ‘squat pen,’ the interconnected, unbroken root between the generations remains alive and teeming with potential for dissemination. And so it has remained these almost 60 years in Heaney’s case.
There is a spade with which to ‘follow men [people] like them’ and a spoon we can always give, not because we have the energy or the good manners or the right temperament ad infinitum, but rather the very opposite.
When we recognise that we dig and give and rise and fall because of our brokenness and bad temper, not in spite of it; with the ‘good turf’ containing beneath its surface what is new and what is old within ourselves in our vulnerability and our strength, and offer this to the want and wealth of God’s elect in the ‘squelch and slap’ that is love’s reality and love’s way, we begin truly to behold that wonderful and sacred mystery that is Jesus’ body, the church, and to recognise our unique grafting within it – the planting of the Lord – that knits us together into a glorious tapestry in which every warp and weft is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, raised up together in Christ’s own broken body, to so much more than we can be without him.
I wonder what you think of saints and sainthood? Because in you too is a spade with which to dig, and together we have spoons aplenty to generate all the energy and ideas needful to God’s economy. This is what it means to share in “the inheritance of God’s own people”, as St Paul calls it in our epistle.
And more than that, we have not inherited this treasure, this fullness, in order to keep it to ourselves. Paul tells the Ephesians that we have been brought near to the God who, in Christ Jesus, has ‘broken down the dividing wall’ between persons by the giving of himself to death on a cross.
It is this breaking down, which in fact builds us together, conversely, in profounder connection one to another than we could have had before: with those whom we love to bits, and those whom we barely like. Each connection, each warp and weft, reflects a glimpse of that beautiful mystery that is Christ in you and in us, the hope of glory, ‘gathering to a greatness’ that must ‘flame out like shining from shook foil,’ as Hopkins puts it in another poem, since the grandeur of God cannot but do otherwise as it streams from the faces and foibles of those whom he calls to be holy as he is holy – to be nothing less than saints. This is not merely a body of potential dwelling in and around us, but rather the very grace and power of God: the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Where do you even start to be a saint or to be holy? Well, as Bishop Michael Ramsey might have said, you’ve got to “want to want to want to.” And here you are – you’ve showed up – so that’s got to be a good start.
So as we come once again, in our day of thanksgiving for the saints who before us have found their reward, may we too exemplify their steadfastness and constancy in seeking the city of God as we dig here among us in hearts and lives, that Christ’s mercy and justice may be manifest in its total divinity, and so remake us and those we still feebly struggle to serve and live alongside, in the power and strength of the sheer humanity he deigns to share, and declares holy. And together, may we each shine in the glory of those inexpressible joys prepared for all who truly love God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN