All Saints Day –Year B
Revelation 21:1-6a
By Dan Epp-Tiessen
Then I saw a renewed heaven and a renewed earth, for the old order of things had passed away. And the sea was no more—the sea that brought colonizers’ ships, soldiers, guns and diseases, and their slaves, and their dreams of wealth, plunder and domination. The sea which was used to strip Turtle Island of its riches—its furs, lumber, fish, agricultural goods, silver and gold—will no longer be available as a highway of exploitation.
This All Saints Day, we pause to remember those saints who have crossed over this year especially mindful of those who have filled these pages and gifted our movements. Here are those we have covered this year. We invite you to add names and stories. We give thanks for their lives and rejoice that they are among us still. Presente!
Joe Morton Continue reading “Remembering the Cloud of Witnesses”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann as part of her series on parenting- Learning from Laughter.
With the table covered in newspaper, the three of us began carving pumpkins. Isaac embraced the gunk helping to pull it out while the Halloween music played and the moon shown out the window. When it came time to cut the faces, I sat beside him and asked what he wanted. We drew it out together in marker. He told me he wanted square eyes and a triangle nose. Out of the blue he insisted that the pumpkin have a mustache. Then I asked about the mouth. Do you want a smile? “No. It’s a sad pumpkin.” I tried to draw a sad mouth. Then he said “Pumpkin crying.” He was asking for tears. I carved out some tears falling from the square eyes. He smiled in total delight and pride at his sad pumpkin. Continue reading “Learning from Laughter: The Pumpkin that Cried Tears”
This All Saints Day, we pause to remember those saints who have crossed over this year especially mindful of those who have filled these pages and gifted our movements. Here are those we have covered this year, we invite other to add names and stories and to cry out Presente!
We give thanks for their lives and rejoice that they are among us still. Presente!
By Mary Bradford,excerpt from Bury the Dead:
Stories of 
Death and Dying, Resistance and Discipleship
The dead come back whether we invite them or not.
They are our friends, our brothers and sisters, our parents and ancestors, our children, our lovers.
They bring memories, insight, blessing and good fortune.
They travel a long, long way.
Who would greet them with a dark house and an empty table?
Show them you remember them. Put out the things they loved,
even the things they loved to death.
Don’t be so judgmental. You can’t reform them now.
Fill the bellies they no longer have.
Refresh the skin that cracked into a fine husk
and drifted away in the desert.
Give the old man his glasses. Maybe he will find his eyes.
Put away your sadness. It sours the music.
Hear the music and dance with the quick, the light, the dry-boned.
One autumn the feast will be for us. Continue reading “Day of the Dead and Death Well Lived”
The dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of a woman,
they are in the crying child,
in the flaming firebrand.
The dead are not in earth:
they are in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,the dead are not dead.
-Birago Diop
Radical Discipleship 