Grief rarely arrives alone. It brings confusion, anger, and a strange numbness that sits beside sorrow like a shadow, and many of us have felt that mix more acutely this year. As we honor saints who have died, we confront the question that keeps surfacing in quiet conversations and late-night prayers: where can I find hope? The answer, drawn from Ephesians 1, does not deny loss or minimize the world’s hurt. Instead, it moves us toward a sturdy place to stand, a foundation described as hope on Christ. That small preposition matters because it shifts hope from a feeling we generate to a ground we stand on, a lived trust that holds even when our hearts do not.
All Saints observance invites names and bells, memory and silence, and the disorienting truth that grief is not simple. Like the song Requiem from Dear Evan Hansen, we can love the one we lost and still feel anger, gratitude, confusion, even relief. Grief isolates and connects at once, pulling us into ourselves while asking us to stand with one another. The Christian response is not to tidy this complexity but to hold it alongside an older, deeper story: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul names it as power set to work, placing Christ above every rule and dominion, every ideology, every demand for our allegiance. That claim does not cancel grief. It relativizes it, giving loss a new horizon and giving mourners language to say both “I ache” and “I trust.”
Hope on Christ exposes the things we are tempted to lean on: wealth, influence, a leader’s promises, or the false comfort of detachment. Each crumbles in time, and each demands more than it can return. The resurrection gives a different economy of meaning. It says that love outlasts death not by sentiment but by power, the same power that raised Jesus and seats him above every name named. From that ground, courage grows. Courage to resist narratives of violence with habits of mercy. Courage to feed neighbors rather than despair at systems. Courage to sing when the words catch in our throats because singing is a way to remember what is truest when feelings are not.
A requiem, then, becomes more than sorrow. It becomes surrender. Not a surrender to despair but a handing over of those we love to the keeping of God, the One who, in Christ, fills all in all. The old Latin prayer "in paradisum" imagines angels receiving the departed and guiding them to the holy city, a picture that steadies us when memory stings. With Lazarus, once a beggar, the prayer dares to say “eternal rest,” not as escape but as fulfillment. This vision does not erase the ache of empty chairs or quiet rooms. It does break the lie that death has the final word. For the church, remembrance and hope meet at the table of resurrection, and from there we rise to work, to comfort, to witness.
So when the question returns—where can I find hope?—we answer: stand on Christ. Not on our resolve, which wavers. Not on our success, which fades. Not on leaders who promise fixes they cannot keep. Stand where the saints have stood, where bells ring out both lament and praise, where names are spoken into the vast mercy of God. From that place we can do the slow work of love. We can hold grief without being held by it. We can speak a messy, honest requiem and still live for the praise of glory, because the story we inhabit keeps going, all the way through death and beyond, toward a rest that is real and a kingdom that will not fall.
All Saints observance invites names and bells, memory and silence, and the disorienting truth that grief is not simple. Like the song Requiem from Dear Evan Hansen, we can love the one we lost and still feel anger, gratitude, confusion, even relief. Grief isolates and connects at once, pulling us into ourselves while asking us to stand with one another. The Christian response is not to tidy this complexity but to hold it alongside an older, deeper story: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul names it as power set to work, placing Christ above every rule and dominion, every ideology, every demand for our allegiance. That claim does not cancel grief. It relativizes it, giving loss a new horizon and giving mourners language to say both “I ache” and “I trust.”
Hope on Christ exposes the things we are tempted to lean on: wealth, influence, a leader’s promises, or the false comfort of detachment. Each crumbles in time, and each demands more than it can return. The resurrection gives a different economy of meaning. It says that love outlasts death not by sentiment but by power, the same power that raised Jesus and seats him above every name named. From that ground, courage grows. Courage to resist narratives of violence with habits of mercy. Courage to feed neighbors rather than despair at systems. Courage to sing when the words catch in our throats because singing is a way to remember what is truest when feelings are not.
A requiem, then, becomes more than sorrow. It becomes surrender. Not a surrender to despair but a handing over of those we love to the keeping of God, the One who, in Christ, fills all in all. The old Latin prayer "in paradisum" imagines angels receiving the departed and guiding them to the holy city, a picture that steadies us when memory stings. With Lazarus, once a beggar, the prayer dares to say “eternal rest,” not as escape but as fulfillment. This vision does not erase the ache of empty chairs or quiet rooms. It does break the lie that death has the final word. For the church, remembrance and hope meet at the table of resurrection, and from there we rise to work, to comfort, to witness.
So when the question returns—where can I find hope?—we answer: stand on Christ. Not on our resolve, which wavers. Not on our success, which fades. Not on leaders who promise fixes they cannot keep. Stand where the saints have stood, where bells ring out both lament and praise, where names are spoken into the vast mercy of God. From that place we can do the slow work of love. We can hold grief without being held by it. We can speak a messy, honest requiem and still live for the praise of glory, because the story we inhabit keeps going, all the way through death and beyond, toward a rest that is real and a kingdom that will not fall.
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