Communion

Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed

John 6:37-40

Jesus said to the crowds:
"Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and I will not reject anyone who comes to me,
because I came down from heaven not to do my own will
but the will of the one who sent me.
And this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day.
For this is the will of my Father,
that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him
may have eternal life,
and I shall raise him on the last day."

I think that this passage gets at the most unattainable aspect of Jesus as fully human:  that he could…actually, literally, fully…come to do the will of the one who sent him…or as it is put elsewhere in John’s Gospel…he could resist coming in his own name.

Who can do this?  Who can allow their own ego to be subordinate to another?  Somehow the answer is in communion.  The how is communion.

And so maybe these feasts of All Saints and All Souls provide a kind of inoculation.  In the remembrance I practice warding off the aggressive ego.  I situate myself in the long line.  I treasure my small but essential quest for sainthood and link it to the grand communion that, without me, might sing ever so slightly off-key.  And I take up this how in communion with those around me. 

Many many years ago I sat next to an old friend at a Penance service.  He confided to me the struggles of his fifty-plus year marriage.  But in the end he turned to me and said, “but that’s what marriage is…isn’t it?  We are supposed to be helping each other get to heaven.”  It sounded so old-fashioned at the time…not so much now.  Now I find myself relying on it! 

Some mystical-clarity from W. H. Auden;)

Through art, 

we are able to break bread with the dead, 

and without communion with the dead 

a fully human life is impossible