How great a multitude! Women and men, husbands and their wives and their children, priests and prophets and mission workers and bakers and tailors and baristas and fire fighters and the homeless ones, the refugees, the trafficked, and the abused leading the march into the celestial celebration of their new found healing and wholeness. See the purple clad martyrs awed by their Spirit-given courage, the white robed virgins dancing with their Spouse, the gilded trains marking the daily holiness of mothers and fathers from every generation.
These are the holy ones who learned to let the Deep call upon their depths, to hope against hope, to be not afraid, to seek and strive after peace, to draw near to God, to pine like a dry and weary land, to forgive with a bounteous forgiveness. These are the men and women who learned to give over their lives to love, peace, joy, patience, goodness, generosity, gentleness, self-control, modesty, kindness, and chastity.
Alas today is the day we are reminded that in the end our seemingly permanently unfinished symphonies are consummated with so sweet a harmony that we rejoice in ecstatic silence and in peaceful shouts. With eyes peering through the overcast of our own finitude and the trials of our days we can see the ones gone before us. We call for their prayers, and we pray that their stories can teach us how to be holy and whole.
We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses that it becomes the very air we breath in. Gasping and panting we breath in all this cloud, all this air, all this grace and it becomes the very spirit within us. We can feel this holy cloud, this breathing wind, this moving spirit envelop and transform us, call us and beckon us onward and homeward and heavenward.
And when we come to the last morning of our time before the eternal Dawn may we hear this multitude crying in whispers and in shouts, "Holy, Holy, Holy is The Lord God almighty. Worthy is the Lamb to receive riches and honor and glory and praise." Upon hearing this the Spirit responds from within us, groaning and sighing in ways we ourselves cannot. It is at this moment that the soul we have always known as broken and wounded and cut off is taken up upon the shoulders of the saints and carried to the throne of Love in Trinitarian perfection. There our soul is embraced and healed, made holy and whole. On this day we enter the march, the great cloud of witnesses, and we begin to add our own story to the song sung forever in the heavens:
"Alleluia! Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory. For the wedding day of the Lamb has come, his bride has made herself ready.”