Charleston: All Faithful Departed
“You have heard the whispers on quiet summer evenings when you have been walking alone. They are the sound of the ancestors, speaking softly just on the other side of what we call real. You have seen the strange lights at twilight, like candles lit in evening rooms, beckoning people home to houses you cannot see.
You have felt the touch on your shoulder, when you were deep in prayer or bent with worry, and known the energy that hums along the wires of faith, the presence of a power that knows how to heal. You have experienced the physical mystery that surrounds us, the mystery of the Spirit, the thousand tiny proofs that we live next door to heaven, waking up in a wonder we are only beginning to discover.”—Bishop Steven Charleston, Facebook, October 31st, 2018.
November 1st is All Saints’ Day, and November 2nd is The Celebration of All Faithful Departed. These two liturgical celebrations are our Church’s family reunion day. It is the time for us to pull out our family photograph album and remember where we came from and all the faithful who influenced our lives.
Where were you the night of April 4th, 1968? My husband and I were seniors in medical school in Memphis. That night, Martin Luther King was assassinated outside of the Lorraine Motel. After that, Memphis became a police state. Clergy in Memphis responded by marching to the office of the mayor, Henry Loeb, to ask for relief for the striking sanitation workers whose cause had brought King to Memphis. The ministers gathered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. At the last moment, Dean William Dimmick, who later became the bishop of Northern Michigan (and eventually baptized our two sons), went into the Cathedral and took down the processional cross from the high altar. Then, holding it high above him (he was a very short man), he led the march down Poplar Avenue to City Hall.
The air was electric. Down the streets, the clergy and supporters marched. A Methodist minister writes about one moment he will never forget: As the clergy advance down Poplar Avenue, up ahead, he sees an older woman sitting on her front porch. As the procession approaches her, she stands up and screams, “GET THAT CROSS BACK IN THE CHURCH WHERE IT BELONGS!”1
Dean Dimmick took the cross out of the cathedral into the streets of a city on the verge of riot. He taught us where Christ lives, especially in times of grief and oppression. Christ is out in the midst of the mess. Christ was out walking the streets of Memphis in 1968.
Today, my prayer is that we can emulate what we learned from a leader of our church, Dean Dimmick, and take Christ out to those who are sick and suffering, to those who are hungry, to those living in poverty, to victims and families of the many recent episodes of violence in our country, to immigrants around the world, to the lonely and fearful, to those who may be invisible to us much of the time.
On the days we remember saints, we especially affirm what we cannot explain. Dean Dimmick will always be there beside us, praying and cheering us on.
1Katherine Moorehead, “Stepping Out of the Tent,” Preaching Through the Year of Mark (Morehouse, 1999), p. 75.
