All Saints, Year A. Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14 · Psalm 24 · 1 John 3:1-3 · Matthew 5:1-12a
A few weeks ago a letter came from Bad Reichenhall, a real one, with a stamp. The parish invites the relatives of the deceased to remember their dead on All Saints' Day. My mother lived there for decades. She died in January.
I was glad of the letter. The parish shows that it has not forgotten us. But the fact that it is needed at all also shows that people now have to be reminded what the day is for.
As a child, nobody had to remind me. On All Saints' Day we stood at the grave in Schleißheim, near Munich, where my grandfather lies, and my brother. He died at eight months; I was born soon after. As a child I could make nothing of his name on the gravestone. Nobody ever spoke about him. Those afternoons were usually cold and rainy. Afterwards we went to my grandmother's, all the relatives came, the good china came out of the cupboard, and there was coffee and good cake. For me the day paid off in another way too, because the relatives slipped me ten-mark notes.
In the liturgical calendar, 1 November is the feast of all the saints; the day of the dead is All Souls, on 2 November. But where I grew up the first is a public holiday and the second is not, so people went to the cemeteries on All Saints' Day. That is how the day became what I knew as a child. It is this custom the letter reminds us of.
The Gospel is the Beatitudes. Jesus goes up a mountain and sits down, his disciples come to him, and one after another he calls people blessed: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. People like to read this as a catalogue of virtues: be merciful, make peace, and whoever manages that will be blessed. For some of them that works. For those who mourn it does not. Grief is not something you practise; you fall into it. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. The sentence is in the passive. Someone else has to do the comforting.
In Bad Reichenhall that was the priest who gave my mother the anointing of the sick and was very gentle in doing so, and Matthias Friedl, a friend who is a deacon there. In Schleißheim it was, as I read it today, the table at my grandmother's.
For the letter from Bad Reichenhall to arrive, someone had to keep a list: the names of those who died in a year and the addresses of their relatives. The reading from Revelation also begins with a count. John sees angels holding back the winds of the earth until the servants of God have received a seal on their foreheads, and he learns how many bear the seal: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel. After that he sees a crowd that no one can count, from every people and language. They stand before the throne in white robes, palm branches in their hands, and cry out aloud. One of the elders asks John who these are and where they have come from. John hands the question back: you know. And the elder does know: they are the ones who have come out of the great distress.
In the First Letter of John there is a promise: we are called children of God, and so we are. A few lines further on: we are God's children now, but what we shall be has not yet been revealed. My brother lived for eight months.
Today I am in Venice. There used to be a bridge across the lagoon to the cemetery island on All Saints' Day. A few years ago the city revived the custom; last year the bridge was still there, this year it is not. I take the vaporetto across to San Michele. No one I know is buried there. I think of my mother and of my brother and of all the others.
This is a reading aid, not a second full version. Zugemutet reads the four texts of the Catholic lectionary each Sunday for what they say about living together. The texts are given; I listen for what comes across.