All Saints Day ushers in new optimism for post-Covid-19 world

The Covid-19 crisis has affected societies and economies around the globe and will permanently reshape our world as it continues to unfold.

While the fallout from the crisis is both amplifying familiar risks and creating new ones, celebrating All Saints Day ushers in new optimism to build back better.

All Saints Day is the Church’s Memorial Day, a time to remember those who have died in the faith of Christ. It is traditionally celebrated on November 1 but may be observed on the first Sunday in November instead.

For Pentecostals and other liberal Christian movements, for whom the observance of special days for the Saints may be problematic, consensus has been found lately, in much broader context. This is a festival in honor of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, the larger context of this festival is in Revelation 7:9-7 concerning the opening of the seven seals. This is an interlude between the apocalyptic sufferings of the Church (Chapter 6: 12-18) and the picture of the Church in heaven (Chapter 8:1-5) by the grace of Christ.

In the classical tradition, the church calendar was divided into patterns-dominical cycle and the sanctoral cycle.

The dominical cycle included all Sundays and other days of the year which celebrated and recalled major events of the Lord like Advent, Christmas, Epiphany and Easter among others. While the sectoral cycle was developed to allow the Church to celebrate the witness of particular saints like martyrs, Paul and Stephen among others.

Gradually, the popularity of the Saints days grew as the number of Saints to be remembered grew. By the time of the reformation, only the most major of the days in the dominical cycle were not displaced by one of the saints, creating panic in church leadership. The reaction was to get rid of the Saints day altogether.

Four hundred years later, there was a growing appreciation of the witness of the Saints and the appropriateness of bringing them back to the Church calendar. Modern day saints were also integrated in most denominational calendars like Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Janan Luwum and Canon Apollo Kivebulaya.

This day underscores how the temporal human experience of pain and suffering is not always reliable and whatever our experiences may be, they do not in any way explain the final word on God’s character of love to all of us.

This feast also invites us to confront post-covid 19 challenges like income polarization, worker vulnerability and more gig work through collective efforts like peer learning, knowledge sharing and collaboration of best practices aimed at  triumphantly sharing in John’s end of time vision for the optimistic Church (Revelation 7:9-17).

Rev. Canon Erich Kasirye 

[email protected] | Chaplain, Kampala Capital City Authority