And social scientists would suggest that behind and within every human interaction is a deeper psycho-social dynamic that can only ever be partially unpacked. We go about our daily lives forgetting and not knowing: forgetting that beneath our feet, or just beyond what the eye can see is an entire world that is 99% invisible.

Today we celebrate All Saints’ Sunday. All Saints’ Day was established in 835, centuries before Protestant churches existed, at about that moment in church history where it seems, there were just too many “official” saints to keep track of. Now every saint could be highlighted on a single day, November 1, without cluttering up the calendar with multiple celebrations every day of the year. In our tradition, this makes room for a kind of democratizing of the saints. No one person is lifted up as more “saintly” than another in the Protestant church. All are part of the great cloud of witnesses, the saints of light who are just beyond the veil, 99% invisible to us, and yet present nonetheless. The saints are all those who were faithful in their own day, and who accompany us now, surrounding us like a cloud.