By Hilary Dawson, Canon Treasurer
This weekend the Cathedral will celebrate the Feast of All Saints on Sunday, followed by the Feast of All Souls on Monday. A few years ago I was in Paris in this season and visited the famous and vast Pe ̀re-Lachaise cemetery. In France, All Saints or Toussaint, is a public holiday and the cemetery was full of people carrying chrysanthemums to place on the graves of loved ones. Red, yellow, bronze and gold, rich and beautiful colours as far as the eye could see, honouring the dead. The great tradition in France is to spend the public holiday of Toussaint meeting up with family and friends, whilst not forgetting those who have died, ahead of All Souls on the following day.
Last weekend my daughter and I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage production of George Eliot’s great novel, Middlemarch. At the heart of the novel is a group of ordinary people seeking to live good lives, even holy lives, whilst navigating a changing world and their own flaws and weaknesses. These are the closing lines of Middlemarch and describe Dorothea, its central character.
‘But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts;
and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’
In this season we are acutely aware of that ‘great cloud of witnesses’. The saints who have walked this way before us and surround us now. Some were called to conspicuous acts of bravery and self-sacrifice, others to lives of compassion and quiet courage. They remind us that to be a saint is not to be perfect, but to be human and to love. Those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. This weekend we remember all the saints, including those whose love has shaped our own lives, and we give thanks for their incalculable effect on the growing good of the world.