All Saints Day

A pause in honor of All Saints Day.

The idea of saints, as my pastor today mentioned, is somewhat problematic for Protestants, for whom (as I was taught in my Baptist childhood) "saint" connotes Catholic traditions we do not entirely share. In place of holding formal canonizations of particular people, Protestants often view sainthood as a personal matter. "Saints" become those in our past who in some way touched us positively, shaped our faith. Today in church, for example, my pastor described going into the cemetery in the town where his family lives to walk among his personal saints. He told stories of his father, his aunts, his grandparents--all of whom were gone, but all of whom had made lasting impacts on his life.

My father always mentions the spiritual influence my maternal grandmother--his mother-in-law--had on him. When she passed away, he would often remark that he missed feeling her praying for him.

That's the other qualification for saints honored on this day; typically, they're understood to have passed away. Often, of course, there's some mention made of saints still with us today, people who continue to nurture our faith. But the Day itself is mainly, as the hymn says, for "all the saints/who from their labors rest." Scripture teaches that a great cloud of witnesses watches us run our earthly race, cheering us on.

Such an image is one of the few references we have in the Bible to what heaven must be like: it apparently involves watching--watching with awareness and encouragement and love.

I'm comforted by this picture of saints watching me. It's not only cheering in the general sense of "someone's rooting for you," though. I mean, I appreciate encouragement. But more deeply than that, the idea of this "great cloud of witnesses" gives me hope that something of those I love--and thus something of me--lingers on. Because, to tell the truth, sometimes I'm not so sure.

I do not think it sacrilegious to be a Christian--to affirm Christ as the Son of God who is reconciler and redeemer--and also wonder about just what comes after death. My faith is based on the person of Christ and the deity of the Godhead, not on a certain knowledge of what the afterlife is. Even if, as I mainly believe, death brings some kind of greater unity with God, I'm not sure just what form that unity might take.

Plenty of religious traditions, for instance, believe in an eternal soul without necessarily subscribing to an eternal consciousness or an eternal integrity-of-self. A soul might be reborn as something entirely different. Or the soul might simply be absorbed into a greater oneness. Either way, the stuff of self, the thing-ness of me, vanishes, overwritten like software.

It's a terrifying thought for me, the possibility of dissolution. Is it any different, I ask sometimes, than atheistic notions of nothingness, of the self as a switch that is turned off forever? So much of the evangelical discourse I study waxes nightmarish about hell, but heaven--unity with the One--holds its own anxieties for mortal little me. A cloud that watches--vague as it may be--hints at a degree of persistence of ego, a hint that it will be me in a new body, cheering on those after me...

But I'm still not entirely convinced. I'm still uncertain.

I think of the preservation of self in the afterlife differently now because of my mother.

I have written before of how she and my father are (along with my sister) the primary saints of my life, and were my mother gone I would picture her as I sang today's songs of remembrance. But she is not gone. She lives in a nursing home in a small town in southwestern Oklahoma, housed in a special unit for people with Alzheimer's and related dementias.

People ask, when they hear about her, if she still recognizes me. "Yes," I answer, though sometimes (during the difficult summer before she went into the nursing home, for example) she has trouble. When I visit her, though, she knows me and is happy to see me--as she is at seeing my father and my sister. We can chat lightly, make jokes, laugh--but there's nothing really beyond the moment of encounter. She does not remember things that happened five minutes before, nor does she remember that we had visited five minutes after we leave. The doctors encouraged us not to say "goodbye" when we go, just "I'll be right back."

Growing up, my image of Alzheimer's (drawn, no doubt, from television) was of a person regressing into childhood memories, which became brighter and clearer for the person. Our experience leads me to imagine more a general erosion of all memory and self. Much of who my mother was is gone. Always an active, alert woman, deeply invested in critical and political discussions, my mother is now largely quiescent. Affable, concerned about others, even a trifle upset when confused--but not really the mother of my memories. Yet when she looks at me and tells me how much she loves me, I flush with the same pride I used to when she said it throughout my childhood.

On All Saints Day, I wrestle with the fact that, metaphysically, I don't know where she "is." Maybe, I think, people with Alzheimer's and other such slow degenerations materialize gradually somewhere else as they dematerialize here. Perhaps my mother is already half in heaven, half of herself watching me run here on earth.

All horrible things are Alzheimer's, I used to say to myself. Not true, of course, but one of the many cruel blows this disease delivers lies in how it disrupts the gesture of memorial. I have the morbid realization, at times, that I miss the person sitting in front of me, holding my hand, listening to me say, "I'll be right back." I slip in and out of past tense when talking about how great my mother is. Was. Is.

I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever find out. What comfort I have now comes largely from the fact that, even now, she herself believes strongly in God and God's love for her. Her sainthood consists of this if nothing else: faith has saturated her being so thoroughly and deeply that no whittling away has yet eradicated it. So long and so carefully has my mother lived in the patterns of the Spirit--a knowledge of God, a trust in God's power, a certainty of God's goodness, a will to commune with God--so ingrained are those patterns that they guide her even in the fading time. If that faith goes at all--and it might--it will be among the last things about her to do leave.

And I'll know--I'll hope--that at that point she will have fully joined the witnesses who watch us all.

JF