Holy Ones, Known and Unknown

Feast of All Saints: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18; Psalm 149

Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

November 2, 2025

I pray that the God may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation as we come to know God, so that, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which God has called us, what are the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints. (Eph 1:17-18, adapted)

In the summer of the year 2000, in mid-June as Spring turned toward summer, my maternal grandmother Helen died. Kateri and I were living in Massachusetts at the time, and I was approaching the close of a two-year stint on a mobile homeless outreach team and preparing to re-enter seminary for a year of Anglican studies, as part of my ordination process. Grandma had been ill and declining for some time, and I was grateful to get a heads up that she only had a few days so I could fly here and be with her, my grandfather, mom, and sister, with Kateri soon following. I was grateful, too, that she was awake and aware enough when I first arrived, to be able to share in expressions of love. She knew and was grateful we were there, and she was clearly ready to release herself into the arms of love. I found her to be at peace, and that is tremendous: she was not someone I knew to be much at peace in life, not at least as I knew her. She had lived through much, more than I knew or know now. Even as someone who knew her well, I am certain there was much I did not know. I loved her, I was loved by her, and I knew that palpably. Even in my sleep: months later when I was well into my extra seminary year I had a vivid dream of her. I was in my grandparents’ kitchen, the yellow tile wrapping around the counter edges, and the phone rang. Someone answered it and held it out: “it’s for you.” As I held the yellow plastic up to my ear, Grandma’s unmistakable voice rang out. “Love!” she said. “I miss you so much,” I replied. And I did. I do.

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, one of the major feasts of the Christian year, transferred to today since it was technically yesterday, November 1^st. Today, technically, is All Souls’ Day, or the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, as it also called. All Souls is a day to lift up not only saints well known to us – saints like Aidan, Cyprian, or one of the many figures that people dressed up as at last night’s fabulous fundraiser. But today is also, as the Episcopal Dictionary of the Church describes it, a day to remember “those who are unknown in the wider fellowship of the church, especially family members and friends.”^[1] In these days of the Fall Triduum, which we entered Friday on the eve of All Hallows and dwell with today in recognition of All Saints and All Souls, the veil between the living and those who have passed through death, between this world and the world to come, is thin. We reverence that thinness today, lifting up individuals we have loved and who have died, and extending the imaginations of our hearts to their collective presence together with all the saints, as a holy body gathered around the God who created us all, singing God’s praise together with us. That holy collective holds us, dear friends, shining in glory even as we “feebly struggle,” as expressed in the hymn For All the Saints.^[2] All Saints and All Souls reminds us that we too are among them, and they us. Yes, we are meant to envision ourselves as among the “holy ones of God” (which is what the saints finally are) even – especially – as we make our way through pain and difficulty, hardship and loss. We are holy not because we are flawless – God knows we are not. We are holy because God has created us beloved, has called us and all creation Good, and urges us to be partakers, active participants in God’s dream here and now, bridging this world and the world to come.

Our Gospel passage from Luke speaks directly, challengingly, and consolingly to this call. Directly because these beatitudes are spoken not of “the poor,” “those who mourn,” and so on, as Matthew’s version does (Matthew 5:1-11). But to “you”—to us. Blessed are we who are poor, who are hungry, who mourn, who weep, who are hated, reviled, excluded, and defamed. And not just in general but now (Luke 6:20-23). In these days, in our actual lives. Which is what the holy ones of God experienced again and again. They lost, they suffered and wept, they were hungry and poor, they were excluded, they mourned. Jesus – who experienced all those things – speaks directly in acknowledgement, in consolation, in hope. You will be filled, will laugh, will be rewarded in some way we – or at least I – cannot fathom. The kingdom itself is – not will be, but is – yours (Luke 6:20). And then the challenge of the woes, unique to Luke, and much in keeping with Mary’s Magnificat. Wealth, being satiated, laughing without tears, being on the top of the popularity heap – all of these states will be subject to Luke’s “great reversal.”^[3] The saints’ call is to love, to give of ourselves, to pray for others, to offer blessings, even in the midst of pain, even among enemies, amid uncertainty and mystery. Not because we are called to be doormats or martyrs – even honoring that some of the saints indeed were – but as an expression of the hope to which God calls us. That hope is of a communion of holy ones knit together in one communion and fellowship despite hardship, despite fracture and brokenness, amid misunderstanding and denigration, even suffering and death. The holy ones of God are a deep expression of Creation in all its spiritual depth, bridging the seen and unseen, known and unknown, held by God, great encouragers, friends to the end.

The Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson has written of the Communion of Saints as a teaching to be retrieved and shared anew in our time. While the doctrine has often been portrayed in deeply hierarchical, patriarchal ways – which we can observe in some of the (to me, beloved yet limited) hymn lyrics often sung on this day – it is much deeper, richer, and transformative than such language conveys. In fact, the Communion of Saints proclaims that “the whole community of redeemed sinners participates in the holiness of God, a liberating dignity that can be claimed equally by each and every one.”^[4] Johnson’s anchoring text for clarifying this vision is from the Book of Wisdom, “in which Sophia [divine Wisdom] is described in this way: ‘Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets’” (Wisdom 7:27).^[5] For Johnson, the saints collectively express “solidarity in difference,” reflecting “the dynamism of God's own life.” They are “a company of the friends of God and prophets,” sources of liberating power and encouragement, literally infusing courage in us in the wake of doubt and despair, in the face of uncertainties.^[6] “These are people who suffered, who knew sin and forgiveness and something of the laughter and tears of love, who gave a cup of cold water, who sought the face of God,” Johnson writes. “Now they have died, passing beyond the veil to the place where ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ Joined with them in a community of ‘God's children,’ persons living today hear a word of hope in the face of the great darkness of death.”^[7]

Such hope in the face of the death’s shadows extends, as I hear it, to broader unknowns that we live with each and every day, even among people we know and love. This hope to which God calls us, through the communion of God’s friends and prophets, invites us to compassionate acknowledgment of the limits of our understanding and the extension of love, like a bridge, across that chasm.^[8] I have been thinking about this limitation of understanding, this call to know the edges of our relational awareness, for some time now. Two summers ago, I came across a beautiful novel by Wendell Berry called A World Lost that spoke powerfully to me of this dynamic. Its main character tells the story of how, in his childhood, he lost his beloved uncle who was killed in uncertain circumstances. Later in life, the narrator comes to terms with what he could and could not know, not only of those circumstances but even of his beloved uncle himself. Early on, the narrator reflects,

Perhaps it was from thinking about him after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.^[9]

Reading this passage, I thought of my grandmother, of my grandfather, of various people I have known well over time, but also whose formative experiences and inner lives I could know only in part, if at all. I think of Betty’s beautiful eulogy of Lois Roach last month, and her recognition that while we know one another in community, there is also much we do not know, that we cannot know.^[10] And that this partial knowing is part of being in community, in communion, with one another. Being held together amid the unknown, inviting God’s compassion to assist and strengthen us in the gaps we may experience with one another whether in the moment or upon later reflection. Being part of the Communion of Saints can be a channel of grace to hold space for one another and for a wider world convulsed with pain and strife.

A little later, Berry’s narrator continues, “Within limits we can know. Within somewhat wider limits we can imagine. We can extend compassion to the limit of imagination. We can love, it seems, beyond imagining. But how little we can understand!”^[11] There is no inherent shame in that limitation; it is part and parcel of being human. Much depends on the awareness with which we hold it. As we stand up against that edge, that limit, in all humility, we can reach out toward the presence of the holy ones, all the partners in this communion who stretch across time and circumstance, allowing ourselves to soak in their wisdom. Including their growth in awareness, as Berry’s narrator imagines:

At times perhaps I could wish [the dead] merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen?... I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time.^[12]

Even as we make our way here in this world, unknowing, those who have gone before stand in greater knowing, bearing witness to the Apostle Paul’s beautiful words in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Berry’s narrator might as well be commenting on Paul’s text when he says,

But now I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day. I live in their love, and I know something of the cost. Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all these years.”^[13]

The saints walk with us, friends, and we with them. They gather around the throne, the abundant table, of God. They model God’s consolation, God’s friendship and prophetic power, God’s liberating love. They are bridges who call us to shape our lives in such manner, to the best of our ability. And they remind us of the hope to which God calls us in the midst of all that we do not know, urging us onward in boldness, in humility, in struggle. Blessed are we who live and love with them.

^[1] https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/all-faithful-departed-commemoration-of/

^[2] “For All the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest,” The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 287.

^[3] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Account (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010)

^[4] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 1999), 2.

^[5] Johnson, 2

^[6] Johnson, 3

^[7] Johnson, 9

^[8] Johnson uses the metaphor of a braided rope footbridge. Friends of God and Prophets, 3-4.

^[9] Wendell Berry, A World Lost (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), 61-62

^[10] https://www.staidansf.org/post/remembering-lois-roach

^[11] Berry, 148-149

^[12] Berry, 150

^[13] Berry, 150-151