For all the saints (and sinners, too)

Happy All Saints' Day. Now that we've made it through the Halloween, it's time to celebrate the lives of the good folks who've gone on before us.

I don't talk much about my faith here on the blog because (as in the world outside blogdom) I hope I do more living and acting on my beliefs than yammerin' on about them. But as a member in good standing (sometimes yes, sometimes no - depending on whether the rector's around or not) of All Saints' Episcopal Church, Atlanta, I couldn't let our patronal feast day go by without a tip of the hat to the third most important day of the Christian liturgical calendar (after Easter and Christmas, of course).

It's the day we read the famous passage in Ecclesiasticus "Now let us sing the praises of famous men . . ." as we honor good people - both great and small - who have died, a time to remember and hold up their lives as patterns for our own. On Sunday our church will be festooned with gorgeous fall flowers, we'll get to sing that most wonderful, triumphant hymn "For All the Saints," and we'll toll the bell for each of the "saints" we've lost in the parish since last All Saints' Day.

On Thursday night we'll welcome scholar John Dominic Crossan as the 2nd annual Ann Woodall Lecturer. He's controversial, but that's just the way we like things at All Saints'. Having been raised a Southern Baptist, I like the idea that I don't have to check my brain at the door before entering my church. It's a comfortable/uncomfortable place for me, and has been for 24 years.

My church is not perfect. No church is. My faith is not perfect. No faith is. It's riddled with questions and ambiguities and conflicting ideas. But I believe that's what faith is. Knowing that I'll never have all the answers. Knowing that I can keep questioning, because that's why God gave me a brain in the first place. Knowing that by being open to life and ideas and people very different from myself helps me live into the life I'm meant to live.

So for Rosa Parks and Sara Owen, two good saints taken from us:

"Their bodies are buried in peace,

but their name lives on generation after generation."