November 4, 2025
“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” Hebrews 12:1
If you were to come to my apartment at this time of year you would find, just inside the entry way the little altar I make each year for El Dia de los Muertos – the day of the dead. It is decorated with vases of flowers, brightly colored paper ones and, when I can find them, fresh, pungent marigolds, bathed in the soft light of flickering candles, with incense wafting toward heaven. On this altar is an odd assortment of things – a set of paints, a Bible, a bowl of popcorn, a replica of the blue water barrels Matthew Moore, our youth director, would lug out into the desert so that fewer would die on their harrowing trek, a letter penned to her congressman in my mother’s flawless Palmer-style cursive. And there are pictures. More every year. Some silly, some somber, little snapshots of people I have loved and now are dead. The altar commemorates these dead and makes an ofrenda – an offering – of the things they loved in life, enticing them, so the tradition goes, to return for an annual visit. And while they don’t actually eat the food left for them, supposedly they suck all the flavor out of it. I don’t know if that is true but I can tell you that the popcorn I leave out each year for my popcorn-lovin’ father, is pretty flat and tasteless by the next day.
I adopted this tradition while living in Mexico back in the late 80’s. El Dia de los Muertos, widely observed in Mexico, dates back to the ancient, pre-columbian tradition of the Aztecs but it resonates clearly with what the Christian writer to the Hebrews referred to as “so great a cloud of witnesses” and what later Christian liturgy would call ‘the communion of the saints.” It is the belief that there is an indelible spiritual bond that links the living and the dead, that the generations that have come before and those alive now share a union – held together in the timeless and eternal embrace of God. Indeed, every time we gather at the communion table we make the bold assertion this feast transcends both place and time, that we are joined at that table in mystical communion with all the saints in heaven uniting our voices in praise, thanksgiving, and hope around the throne of grace.
In honor of that great cloud of witnesses I have kept the tradition of creating an altar each year – at first because I wanted my children to know those saints even the ones who had died before they were born. And I observe it still to keep up a lively acquaintance with the merry company of heaven.
Every year for All Saints Day, Joe Genau, pastor at Edgewood, preaches a sermon on that merry company, telling the stories of Edgewood folk who have died that year. Hilarious, poignant, tender and raw, eliciting both laughter and tears. And eliciting something else – the unshakeable sense that, in Christ, the veil between this world and the next is thin, or as Anglican preacher, Phillips Brooks put it, “The barrier between this world and the next is more of a curtain than a wall and from time to time we hear the rustles of life on the other side.”
Who are your saints – those people whose life and witness made an indelible mark on your own life? When I think of mine, I am indeed inspired to run with perseverance the race God has set before me. With their example, and in their company, how could I do otherwise?
As ever in prayer,
Sue