“For All the Saints”, v. 4, 5
“O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia
“And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia”
(Link: Praying with the imagination in the tradition of Francis and Ignatius.)
I’ve been living with an image in my imagination for several months now, perhaps; better, Christ has been praying it within me, for I could never have come to this of my own accord. In my childhood bedroom, I am in my bed and my parents are kneeling beside as they did nightly for prayer. Jesus is present too, in the way that he is frequently present in such imagining prayers, at once palpably real and, too, indiscernibly present. My parents too are so real that I want to weep and run to them and hold on forever, and yet they too are difficult to define and discern.
Lord Jesus Christ, how I miss them, they have been dead for so long. I was 25 when I was orphaned for a second time I my life. My mother died that year, four years after my father’s dying. Neither had been well for so many long years, endless days of years filled with sickness and pain. My father a “dead man walking” through my growing up years struggling with the declines of congestive heart failure and my mother, a disappointed, angry, drunk with a venomous heart whose ridicule was flung at those closest to her, my dying father and me. Our very breathing simply seemed to fall short and disillusion.
Lord Jesus, I miss my parents more than I can say. They have been dead for so long; my father for 33 years, my mother for 29. In this prayer, you, Jesus, are holding us all so tightly together that we seem bound, one to the other in ways that in our living together and in their dying, were impossible to discern. Difficult days, so many of which flowed with pain and renting grief, your presence, impossible to discern. (Especially in her dying, Lord, so alone as she cursed you and died; succumbing to the poisons of her own heart.)
Yet, you are here now, dearest One, holding us in blessed communion, the struggles of their days in flesh and blood, grief and pain far behind them; your glory shining from deep within them in ways I can only begin to see thorough the dim mirror of this praying. The communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are not simply words on a page committed to memory, ideas to share in a community of belonging. No, they are prayers for our living: to forgive and be forgiven of that which separates me from these most beloved saints, blessedly, now and for so long, at rest in you, is to begin to accept your forgiveness and to begin the forgiving. Of them, of you, most especially of myself.
Lord Jesus, I miss my parents more than I can say. They have been dead for so long; my father for 33 years, my mother for 29. In this prayer, you, Jesus, are holding us all so tightly together that we seem bound, one to the other in ways that in our living together and in their dying, were impossible to discern. Difficult days, so many of which flowed with pain and renting grief, your presence, impossible to discern. (Especially in her dying, Lord, so alone as she cursed you and died; succumbing to the poisons of her own heart.)
Yet, you are here now, dearest One, holding us in blessed communion, the struggles of their days in flesh and blood, grief and pain far behind them; your glory shining from deep within them in ways I can only begin to see thorough the dim mirror of this praying. The communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are not simply words on a page committed to memory, ideas to share in a community of belonging. No, they are prayers for our living: to forgive and be forgiven of that which separates me from these most beloved saints, blessedly, now and for so long, at rest in you, is to begin to accept your forgiveness and to begin the forgiving. Of them, of you, most especially of myself.
For you healed them, blessed Jesus, tired and worn as they were, pain-riddled and grief-soaked in their beings, into the gentle and merciful heart of your divine fellowship so long ago. It is my heart which has labored on for all these years, longing for that which I can only know in surrendering the feeble struggle shared with them to you who has held us all so gently for years beyond our knowing. May my ear hear your distant song in these days. May my heart find courage and strength in you. May I know in this prayer of us united with you in love and peace is the communion of saints, the divine fellowship I pray to find with all whose feeble struggles I share. Amen.
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