Next Tuesday November 1st is All Saints Day. Let us think about the Saints and who they are. I use the present tense because even though they have left this earth they are very much alive praising God Iin Heaven. They are people who having given their life to the Lord, continued to love him with deep devotion. Often they were called to endure hardship and pain as they lived their lives of bravery and compassion. They were apostles and martyrs, bishops, priests and deacons, scholars and poets missionaries, doctors and nurses, translators and hymn writers, reformers and ordinary folks like you or me.
Why are certain people designed as saints and given special days to remember them? That is so that we may be guided and inspired by their lives, thus enriching the whole church. As Anglicans as we do not pray to the saints or ask them to intercede for us. I cannot help feeling that we do join the heavenly chorus and worship with them. Do we make or canonize these saints? I once asked my father about that. His answer as I remember it was that we could but that saints should be universal in all the churches throughout Christendom. We therefore add to our church calendar new names without enrolling such persons as saints.
We all need to learn more about the saints. First of all, why not turn to our church calendar to be found on page IX in the BCP and page 22 in the BAS. Read through the names of the saints and note the century that they lived in. Many will be familiar, Think about them and try to find out more about them. Turn to September 10 where you will find the name Edmund James Peck missionary to the Inuit. Edmund Peck is our own Trinity Barrie saint. As far as I know he was born here, he certainly grew up here and returned here where he died in 1924. There are still Pecks in Barrie. Mary Grasset Anderson used to tell me that she remembered him as a little girl. Her father knew him. They often met on walks near his home not far from the Shanty Bay Road.
By a strange coincidence, my own mother who was never in Barrie knew him. In fact, they corresponded. In those days, it was not uncommon for people to correspond with missionaries, much as one might correspond with a serviceman overseas today. Alas, I cannot remember much that she told me about him, but I am left with the picture of a lonely figure enduring extreme hardship and physical injury that he had to deal with by himself. Perhaps someone would like to do research about Edmund Peck that we might know more about him and be uplifted and inspired by our own special saint, whose life empowered by the Holy Spirit reflects the great mysteries of Jesus Christ and his Father our Creator
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