Yes. I’m procrastinating. I should be writing Very Intelligent Things on knowing and unknowing in the Cloud of Unknowing for a book chapter I stupidly got roped into doing. I’ve just printed out a good set of Aquinas extracts and the Epistle of Discretion for marking up alongside the Cloud and am celebrating that hard-won progress by doing random blogging…

I love All Souls. It’s the last bit of the goth Triduum (Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls) and the only set day of the Sanctorale where the appointed color is black. And the vestments today at church were to die for… (Literally, of course–it’s the set they use for Requiem masses.) But as I was telling Dave on the phone, I think that the current protestant attempt to recover the saints in general and All Saints in particular has really wrecked the church’s sense of All Souls. As you probably now, the standard early 21st century protestant take is that everybody gets to be a saint. Yeah, I know there’s *some* theological basis for that…but where does it leave All Souls? If we’ve already celebrated all the baptized yesterday, who were we celebrating today? All the non-Christian dead? I mean–in one sense, yes, since we are celebrating literally all souls but… The way to recover it, as far as I can see, is to draw the line and say–look, yes, we’re all saints in one sense but in another sense some people really did do an exemplary job of showing forth the love of Christ in their lives. These people really should be held up as exemplars and as intercessors. Perhaps the problem is that we’ve lost the third section of the Church… Traditionally we spoke of the Church Militant (all of us living folks here on earth still slogging away), the Church Expectant (those who have died and are generally hanging around waiting for the resurrection), and the Church Triumphant (those souls who are already participating in the fullness of God and who are–even as you read this–interceding before the throne of God on behalf of us poor slobs).

Ok. Must do work. Oh, one more thing–for those of you who are interested, I posted something over at the other blog on singing the psalms. Enjoy…