Weekend Wisdom - All Souls, 2025
This weekend we remember all the souls who have gone before us - the incredible communion of saints and the souls in purgatory. During this changing of seasons we believe the veil that separates Heaven and earth is thin and we can remember them with both great clarity and depth.
I especially appreciate this scripture passage from the very first book of Bible - Jacob’s dream reveals the rest of the story. Jacob sees the angels, God’s messengers, as they travel up and down that ladder between heaven and earth. This is Jacob’s dream: a constant traffic between this life and the divine life. This is where God speaks to Jacob.
When he wakes up, Jacob announces one of the most profound statements in the whole of Scripture: “Surely the Lord was in this place— and I did not know it.” It is a remarkable observation, but the point of the story isn’t exactly that God was in Beer-sheba, or Haran, or Bethel, or Jerusalem. All those things are true, but the point of the story is that God was in Jacob. And he didn’t even know it.
Through the incarnation, through God becoming flesh and walking among us, and through our baptism and the body, blood, soul and divinity we take into our lives in the Eucharist, God is with us, too. God is in us and with us, and like Jacob, most of the time we don’t even know it.
Let us remember those we have lost, especially this year, with hope. Let us pray for them and ask them to pray for us and with us. Let us look to their examples and their lives to guide us into the Heavenly kingdom - especially all we can do to bring God’s kingdom to birth right here, right now.
Fr. Mike Ingold, Pastor
St. Mary
Jacob’s Ladder
“Then he had a dream: a stairway rested on the ground, with its top reaching to the heavens; and God’s angels were going up and down on it.
And there was the LORD standing beside him and saying: I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants.
Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and through them you will spread to the west and the east, to the north and the south. In you and your descendants all the families of the earth will find blessing.”
- Genesis 28:12-14