A Reflection for the Solemnity of All Saints
Find today’s readings here.
In my years of recovery from addiction, I have become friends with many interesting people. One of my closest companions is a professional guitarist named James who tours with a popular band. We talk almost every day when he is not on the road. Whenever his band comes to a city near me, we make sure to meet up.
James and I were friends long before he became a performing artist. I treasure my memories of summer nights when we lived near each other and he would come over to watch baseball and hang out on my patio. Like many talented artists, James has had a painful life. I have memories of other late nights, of emergency phone calls and, weeks later, of a visit to him in inpatient mental care. He abused drugs intermittently for a long time; even today, he sometimes has to work hard to keep his mental health on a solid foundation.
I can still remember the first time I saw James perform in front of a crowd. Several years ago, he was touring with a popular act and came to the city where I lived. The pavilion had a capacity of about 5000 and was nearly full. The set started with several high-energy songs. James and the vocalist threw themselves into the performance, matching each other’s intensity note-for-note. He was completely zeroed-in and present to the music. He was truly himself in a way that I had never seen, or even intuited to be possible. Gone was my complicated friend and his self-effacing wit. In his place was a blur of creativity pumping out energy to thousands of people.
In the weeks that followed, I reflected on that experience many times. It tugged at my consciousness because there was something more to it than the astonishing contrast between the performer and my quiet, complicated friend. A memory that returns for repeated reflection is often a sign that God is trying to get our attention. After a long time, I realized that the James I had seen on the stage was the James that exists in the mind of God. When God first dreamt of James, that dream was one of energy, music and joy. That was the divine inheritance that James received as a child of God. For a couple of hours one night in Boston, I got a chance to see that dream become reality.
“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” God has dreams for all of us. The great saints gave us a long look at God’s dream at work in them, but I suspect that every person who has walked this earth has left behind clues of the dream God has for them.
If today’s celebration reminds us of nothing else, it’s to keep an eye open for the divine dreams that are present in every person we meet. All of us run the risk of obscuring the work of God in us and ignoring that same work as it unfolds in the lives of others. That does not change the reality that every human being began as God’s dream and advances in God’s love. As Christ’s disciples, we have the duty to seek out evidence of the dreamer and the dream, knowing that—in God’s kingdom—we shall see as God sees and know the truth of what we now behold.
