a blessing for the day we mourn our dead (All Saints’ day)

Today we are drawn into remembrance. The complexity of love and loss both warms our hearts and chills our bones.

Invisible connections are revealed just as the light of the sun illuminates the lines of a web, we see that our lives are connected to those who are no longer here.

Blessed are we who acknowledge the impressions made by those who’ve passed a child’s nose, a joke carried on, a chair left in our name, a story that we now tell.

Blessed are you who have learned to make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense without them.

And blessed are you with grief present still
who carry the weight of surviving a loved one,
of keeping the memories and sharing the stories.

O God, you alone know the whole of it. You know their sufferings, their joys, their hopes, their winding paths and every movement of their souls.

Restore our souls, even as you receive theirs. welcome them in with the kind of embrace we wish we could give them.

Blessed is the time they were given and the time you now have.
whether in life or in death, love is there.