In 1942, in the pandemonium of the blitz and fire bombings, an Oxford don published a series of
secret instructions to an inexperienced, and inept, foreign agent. The writer, a senior bureaucrat
of long field experience, was not a Nazi, but a demon bent on luring human beings to hell. In
the second letter, he writes:

My dear Wormwood,
I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties;. . . [But] There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a
brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us...

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. . . I do not mean the Church
as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is a half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new [subdivision] building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understand, and one shabby little book containing
corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.
When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like `the
body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter... Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have [shoes] boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. . . His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs, and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real–though of course an unconscious–difficulty to him. Never
let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him that peculiar kind of clarity which hell affords. 1

Today, in observing the Feast of All Saints, we celebrate `the Church . . . spread out through all
time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners’

This feast goes back to the age of martyrs, when those who had died for Christ were remembered on the Friday after Easter, paralleling Christ’s death for humankind on Good Friday. In the Eastern Churches it inched forward to the Sunday after Pentecost and became a celebration of all those who had died in Christ. In the west, in the mists of Anglo-Saxon England, it got shifted to November 1st and spread through Europe.

All Saints Day is one of the principle feasts of the Church. If you open the Prayer Book to page
15, you’ll find it listed there right along with Easter and Christmas, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, Ascension Day and Epiphany; –but of all these major feasts only All Saints Day can `always be observed on the Sunday following. . . , in addition to its observance on the fixed date.’ All Saints Day or All Saints Sunday is also one of four feasts recommended for baptisms.2

If we were having a baptism today we would in a few minutes recite the ancient baptismal creed,
and profess our belief in `the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the
body, and the life everlasting’. You don’t have to know much about church history or church
politics to realize we’re not talking about the church as most of us in the pew usually view it. So
let’s look at it in a couple other ways.

Let’s drop the military metaphor and try another image. In our `shabby little book containing
corrupt texts of. . . religious lyrics’ there is part of a not at all bad poem by the 17th century poetpriest George Herbert; the third verse, not in the hymn, reads:
A man that looks on glasse
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heaven espie. 3

Let’s think of the church as a glass house–a sort of architectural equivalent of a city on a hill. The
church, like glass, is supposed to be transparent. Through it we, who are inside, should be able to see God’s glory, and through it direct the gaze of those outside to the love and forgiveness of
God. But not infrequently we do the one thing that we know people who live in glass houses shouldn’t do. Or we focus on the cracks and chips Christians over the centuries have made by throwing stones at each other. We concentrate on the surface smears and specks–the little things that drive us crazy in the parish or somewhere. We wallpaper the partitions we’ve built to let us ignore various & sundry Christians we really don’t want to mix with. We `stay’ our eye on the surface of the glass; saints choose to let their eye `through it pass’; they clean the glass and they repair the cracks and they hack down the partitions, but their eye is focussed beyond the glass.

Let’s try just one more image. In the words of another Anglican poet, T. S. Eliot, the occupation of a saint is
. . .to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time. . .4

Early Christians regarded saints as `friends of God’. Where they–or their bodies-- were, God’s
power was believed to be most intensely present. In star-trek terms– saints are wormholes: points
of immediate access between time-bound creation and the timeless Creator.

But let’s come back to earth. Some of those saints we’re about to name wore very squeaky sandals, too. Cyril of Alexandria was bad-tempered and opinionated; Francis of Assisi was an irresponsible drop-out; Hildegard of Bingen was a shrewd hypochrondriac with a will of iron; Thomas Cranmer spent most of his career subordinating religious conviction to royal whim. Yet without them the church would be the poorer. To Cyril we owe a deepened understanding of how humanity and divinity co-exist in Christ; to Francis the realization that abject poverty does not signal God’s disfavor; to Hildegard the recognition that women, too, are made in God’s image; to
Cranmer the incomparable beauty of Anglican liturgy.

Every time we profess our belief in the communion of saints we are declaring our conviction that
ordinary, flawed people can become `saints’; we are affirming our belief in the forgiveness of sins,
the presence of the Holy Spirit in human lives, and the life everlasting in the communion of saints
`spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity’.

Communion of saints can sound a little static, or a little saccharine. It translates the original greek
phrase koinonia ton hagion. Koinonia–much in vogue among theologians nowadays-- is dynamic:
it does mean communion, it also means `participation, sharing; in-gathering, striving together, growing into ever deeper intimacy’. Koinonia ton hagion is the believing, sharing, working, and worshipping common life of persons who are being made holy.

Why be holy? Be holy, God says; as I the Lord your God am holy!5 But how do ordinary people
become `holy’? St Paul gives us a clue in today’s epistle: by having `the eyes of their heart
enlightened’. Not with our physical eye, not with our mental eye, but with the eye of the heart–the
perception at the very core of our being–we can look through the glass, past the cracks, beyond
the sham gothic building and the squeaky shoes; we can catch a glimpse of the communion of all
those-- those long dead, those still living, and those still to be born; those we admire and those
we try to avoid--who are becoming holy; and with them we can learn to share in the source of
holiness, communion with the timeless and flawless God who is one yet three, who is the perfect and eternal koinonia.

To participate ever more deeply in this `holy fellowship’6, we need to make Saint Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians our prayer: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give us a
spirit of wisdom and revelation as we come to know him, so that with the eyes of our heart
enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of his
glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for
us who believe, according to the workings of his great power.

It’s our choice.

1 The Scretape Letters, Letter 2

2 BCP 312
3 The Elixer, Hymn 592.
4 The Dry Salvages

5 Lev 20:7
6 Thanksgiving after Communion, Rite 1; BCP 339.