All Saints Day: A Father's Lament
Today is All Saints Day, the day set aside when we remember and give thanks to God for the faithful who have gone before us, the invisible church triumphant that parallels into perfection what our church militant still struggles with this side of heaven. In the liturgy this morning, I included a series of readings from Scripture and prayers that included this: And, finally, we remember those who have no one to remember them; those who died in infancy; the miscarried, the aborted, and the stillborn; and those martyred for the sake of Christ. I do this ever year for All Saints, and every year, that paragraph catches in my throat. I think of those people, the unnamed, the unremembered, the unknown, and I feel a little less human at how our society treats the least. I've stood in paupers cemeteries filled with graves, most with names but some with name spaces left blank, a far, far cry from the celebrated Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers in Washington DC. No one stands ...