This season of the year and on 1 November the Christian Church is celebrating All Saints day. Writing on the theme of what has been called ‘the communion of the saints’, F W Boreham tells this story:“I am irresistibly reminded of that fine entry in Grant Duff's Notes from a Diary. An old priest was trudging home through the deep snow after early Mass in a tiny Irish chapel on the morning of All Saints' Day. A man stopped him to ask, with a suspicion of irony in his voice, how many had attended Mass on such a morning. A twinkle came to the eye of the little priest and his face literally shone. ‘Millions!’ he replied, ‘millions! millions!’”
“He had been celebrating at Mass the fact that we are encompassed about by a countless cloud of witnesses! We do not need to wait for All Saints' Day to enter into the felicity of that uplifting thought. Those whom we have loved and lost awhile are never far away. For them the illusion of distance has been shattered for ever.”
F W Boreham, Boulevards of Paradise (London: The Epworth Press, 1944), 59.
Image: ‘Millions, millions, millions’