Death and Rebirth and the Communion of Saints

I have to admit I don’t remember a lot about the 1984 movie Places in the Heart.

Set in Texas during the Great Depression, it stars Sally Field as a mother of two children who loses her husband to a tragedy, and as such, is likely to literally lose the farm where they live and by which they survive. The film, also depicting the Jim Crow South, deals with the barbaric realities of racism and the effects it has upon various citizens of the particular small town depicted.

The thing I DO remember is the closing scene where the citizens of this town—the characters we have come to know including those whom we have observed dying in the course of the story—are gathered together for a Sunday morning church service where hymns are sung and Holy Communion is served. All of them passing the bread and the juice, serving each other. A New York Times article from that period stated

“There are certain things images can explain and words cannot,” says Robert Benton, writer-director of ”Places in the Heart,” in explaining why he ends his extremely realistic movie with the wish-fulfillment fantasy of two dead men sharing the body and blood of Jesus Christ in a communion service. ”There is something in the image of the man who has been killed handing the communion plate to the boy who killed him that seems very moving to me in ways I cannot explain,” he says. ”I had the ending before I ever finished the screenplay, although I knew audiences would be confused about it.”

I can imagine I’d be confused and yet…

There’s a passage from Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow that was shared with me by a dear friend some years back. It has now become my annual All Saints Day read. It’s not so fantastical but rather mystical. Jayber is a janitor in a small country church in a rural Kentucky river town where he and his people had always lived. He shares,

One day when I went up there to work, sleepiness overcame me and I lay down on the floor behind the back pew to take a nap.  Waking or sleeping (I couldn’t tell which), I saw all the people gathered there who had ever been there. I saw them as I had seen them [as a child] from the back pew, where I sat with Uncle Othy (who would not come in any farther) while Aunt Cordie sang in the choir, and I saw them as I had seen them (from the back pew) on the Sunday before. I saw them in all the times past and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time: the cheerfully working and singing women, the men quiet or reluctant or shy, the weary, the troubled in spirit, the sick, the lame, the desperate, the dying, the little children tucked into the pews beside their elders, the young married couples full of visions, the old men with their dreams, the parents proud of their children, the grandparents with tears in their eyes, the pairs of young lovers attentive only to each other on the edge of the world, the grieving widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers of children newly dead, the proud, the humble, the attentive, the distracted–I saw them all. I saw the creases crisscrossed on the back of the men’s necks, their work-thickened hands, the Sunday dresses faded with washing. They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.

Yesterday my congregation, the church that I serve, celebrated our 171^st anniversary. Not that old by many standards, but older than some. Next Sunday, at the conclusion of the liturgical year, along with the Reign of Christ Sunday, our focus will be on a cultural observance (because we are a Protestant German immigrant congregation) called Totensonntag or Sunday of the Dead. It’s sort of like All Saints Day. We will remember those especially who have passed onto the nearer presence of the Lord over this past year. I have come to really appreciate ending the calendar with this yearly observance and just the simple act of the recitation of names within the worship service is profoundly moving.

My congregation is small and in many ways, challenged. We’re not unique. I read this just last week that “the percentage of U.S. churches with attendance of 100 or fewer increased from 45 percent of congregations in 2000 to 70 percent in 2020.” I imagine it’s even more now. To be sure we want and need to connect with more folks! Absolutely! AND we certainly need to adapt and change. (For instance I personally want to go back to weekly celebration of the sacrament of Holy Communion like Calvin’s sixteenth century Geneva!)

But I do wonder, however, about those who have come before us? I don’t say that in an effort to make them happy or to serve what they determined was to be our direction—actively or inactively. What I wonder about is their presence? Dare I say, involvement? Through Christ, of course. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…”

A bookmark was handed to me last week following worship. It was homemade. It had been, it seemed, placed into a hymnal some time ago and perhaps forgotten or lost. The person who found it knew not from where or who.

You can see that on one side of the bookmark someone used a marker to color some flowers. The other side is more personal and poignant. There is a photograph of a child, maybe a toddler, above them, in handwritten cursive: Happy Father’s Day! Love A— and B— and C—.

No one recognized the photo—nor did I. But I did know the names. The bookmark immediately brought me a smile and a sadness. A— and B— moved upstate well before my time in this congregation. Little C— is now all grown up, married, and has a child of her own.

Their parents were pillars in this church. During the pandemic, they too relocated upstate to be closer to their family because they were both in ailing health. First, she passed away. Then he took ill. I had the chance to visit him a week or so before he passed. We sat and talked, shared stories, discussed church business, this old man and me at times holding hands.

I pray weekly that we are grateful for God’s “gifts and mindful of the communion of [God’s] saints. I suppose I wonder if I always mean that? I will say, today, stuck between Anniversary Sunday and Sunday of the Dead, choking up when I shared in my message about the bookmark, I DID mean it. I don’t necessarily understand it. But I certainly mean it. And I am not only mindful. I’m thankful too.