For All the Saints, who from their labors rest

Earlier this month, the Church celebrated All Saints Day. That week I returned to the suburban parish where my parents had worshipped for nearly 50 years, and where their ashes are immured in its columbarium. Few people at that parish remember me, though I was raised and confirmed there. But in my life, I have tried to honor my parents' upbringing and that parish by serving as senior warden of a struggling inner-city parish, a board member of one of the diocesan charities, and for 10 years as a columnist for the diocesan newspaper. A bit over a year ago, a Marine honor guard assisted as we placed my father’s ashes next to my mother’s, the final act of remembering the man who had made the sacristy credence table for the communion elements and who had given in my mother’s memory the garden of grace and reflection, honoring the woman who had chaired two of that parish’s spring fairs. In that year, another former servant of that suburban parish passed on: the Rev. Wm K Gros. He had been the parish's frst curate in the 1960s. After that he served a number of parishes in both city and suburbs, retiring to serve as a hospital chaplain near the University of Illinois hospitals on the near west side of Chicago. Unmarried, he literally devoted his life to the church, and in the highest compliment any believer can pay to a priest, inspired one child of his first parish to the ordained ministry. Last spring, I attended Bill’s funeral at the Church of the Atonement in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. There I was reminded of something my father had said a number of years before. You see, I have not been on board with many of the decisions of the national church, and one such decision particularly rankled me at that time. The retired bishop of downstate Quincy, IL, who in his earlier service to the church had been the rector of the parish I attended in college, had just been deposed without a trial. But my father, who had lived though war and depression had told me: David, the church will not get any better if you leave. The national church has once again set its sails against scripture, and has seen a third of its members leave because of it. But may those words direct the Holy Spirit’s flow in the hearts of those who bear in their hearts the memory of the saints, like Bill and my parents, who from their labors rest. And may the saints who remain continue to minister to the sick, the friendless and the needy no matter how the winds of popular culture blow.