All Saint’s Day – The Communion of Saints
Speaker Notes
The Collect for All Saints
Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant us grace so to follow Thy blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
All Saint’s Day – The Communion of Saints
Friar Johann Tetzel, working for Archbishop Albert of Mainz
“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from Purgatory springs.” 1517 AD
Hebrews 11 Biblegateway link
C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed, Chapter 3 (page 67-68) quote:
And then one or the other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off – something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.