All Saints/All Souls Day: For the past half dozen All Saints Days we have been placing in front of the altar pictures of those who have died during the past year.  Interspersed with them are icons of other saints.  Each year I find myself drawn to the images and realize that the pictures of those who have died this past year become new icons- images that take me to a reality beyond themselves.

Seeing them in this way reminds me that these who have died recently have moved into a communion that spans millennia.  They are now as much a part of Abraham and Sarah, Paul and Theresa of Avila, Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King, Jr., just as close to them, as they are a part of us.  And their still felt closeness to us suggests to me the actual closeness of all those named above.

When, five years ago, my father's picture was among those at the altar,  I connected with his picture during the liturgy. We had not lost each other.  I realized we were knowing each other differently.   Can I explain how? No.  And yet some transaction of soul took place in that time in that moment.  Being present to each other in that moment created something larger than either of us.  It created a space of soul that had not been present before.

I saw that again yesterday, watching as people came forward for communion.  Communion happened on many levels.  Receiving the elements with these whose images were gathered at the altar, feeling them present, longing and remembering, we participated in a remembrance that was as much effective as it was affective.  I think none of us are the same from the experience.

"This is my body given for you... take it in remembrance...'  I am grateful that somehow this remembering is more than reminiscing.  Something in us changes in the process.  They are not gone, they are changed and so are we.