All Saints Day
Guest Writer: Karen Dubert
All Saints’ Day: a Crowd of Saints 2020
“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation.”— Rev 7:9.
Fra Angelico
My solitude of social distance is suddenly congested
by reminders of the great cloud:
that crowd of witnesses huddled over there in eternity,
peering into time
from vast margins of timelessness,
voids of space.
How is it that we eternal beings—
embedded in time,
prehistoric insects in amber—
How is it we so obsess over the amber
that we imagine ourselves the focus?
We sing of saints “who from their labours rest”
possibly imagining
eternity as an endless “rest" of watching us—
Dreary infinitude.
This amber chamber in which we live and move and be
confounds, imprisons us
defining our vision
regulating our expression;
so we envision the ancestors of millennia
eagerly peering over each other’s shoulders
to catch glimpses of us—
“the living ones”
The irony catches in my throat,
a log hung up on the flotsam of a cosmic flood.
That our amber-vision defines us
rather than enabling us
to gaze beyond and marvel that
out of here, somewhere
amberlessness means
movement.
(revised 2 Nov 2021)
Karen Dubert
Grace Chapter Daughters of the King at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Little Rock, will lead a prayer vigil on Election Day, November 5, 2024. The chapel at Saint Mark’s will be open for prayers from 8:30 a.m. after Morning Prayer to 4:30 p.m.
St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church Dancing Saints David Sanger
Joanna joannaseibert.com