Sooner or later, I think we all come to a time when we experience the questions which cannot be answered. When we stand for a moment or a day or a year at the limit of our reality, with one foot near the ragged edge, where we can’t help but peer beyond it into the light, or into the darkness. Either way, into a place where nice, clean, logical answers fashioned in our reality just don’t work. All Saints’ Sunday, with its juxtaposition of reading the names of the dead and baptizing new Christians, invites us to feel with our toes for that ragged edge.

One such boundary experience happened to me while I was a chaplain at Emory Hospital. I was on call, so I was trying to sleep on a lumpy cot when the beeper went off in the middle of the night. The call was to the children’s hospital. A one-year-old baby girl had been brought in with meningitis. Another hospital in another part of the state had misdiagnosed her symptoms and sent her home. Now she had been brought in critical condition. She died before I got there.

I don’t remember a lot of the details of that evening. I arrived and went into the room. The family was gathered there, and the mother sat in a rocking chair holding her baby. Rocking her. Stroking her lifeless, porcelain white cheek.

It was the middle of the night, and it was very quiet. Everything that happened in the room was hushed. I had a powerful sense that the room was holy ground as the family and I stood in a circle around the rocking chair and said prayers. I read the prayer for commendation at time of death. “Into your hands, O Merciful Savior, we commend your servant . . . .”

And then the hushed, holy quiet was pierced by a cry that cut through it like a flaming sword. The mother, cradling her baby, looked up for the first time and cried out her daughter’s name to the heavens before collapsing in tears.

I will never forget it. That cry was a primal wail of pain. It came from the depths of the earth, the foundation of existence. It was the wail of all parents everywhere from the beginning of time who have lost children. It was a scream on behalf of everyone who has been forced to endure unspeakable pain and loss with no reasonable explanation.

It was a cry that had in it both the question “Why?” and the realization that none of our answers would really answer.

It lasted but a second, but it echoed in the quiet room, as it echoes in my mind still. And the holiness of the room was only increased by that haunting cry. So no one moved to comfort the mother. Any words of comfort would have been pitifully inadequate. We knew that there would be a time for comforting, but for now it was enough, it had to be enough, that we all stood together—together on the ragged edge of our reality where answers don’t work.

Some people can’t stand in that place. They have to have answers, no matter what they have to do to get them. The sound of that wail is more than they can bear.

But in that hospital room there were no answers, and yet, it was a holy place, made more holy still by that cry, that cry that did not deny the experience of great pain, but expressed it in the presence of God—that cry that was a powerful and faithful prayer, more faithful than any explanation, any attempt at answer, could ever be.

Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. I don’t imagine this a gentle, polite, little crying. This isn’t, “Big boys don’t cry.” The text says twice that he was “greatly disturbed.” This is no quite sob. This is a wail, a wail from the foundation of existence.

But then Jesus resuscitates him: “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man comes out, bound in strips of cloth. “Unbind him, let him go,” Jesus says. How we wish we could do that. Who has not stood at the grave, smelled the dirt and tasted your own tears, and not wished you could do that?

But Lazarus is not alive today. After Jesus resuscitated him, Lazarus died. Maybe he lived to a ripe old age, but then he died. No one escapes death.

Today, we celebrate All Saints’ Day. In a few minutes, the bell will ring, and candles will be lit, as the names of each of our dead are read. But the ringing, and the lighting, will also be for the porcelain skinned little girl in the rocking chair. The bell will also ring for my friends who died of AIDS, and whom I still miss, and for all those who have died of AIDS. The candles will be lit for all those you miss terribly, those who have died of any disease, any senseless accident, any violence, suicide, or just old age. The ringing, the lighting will be for those killed in Iraq, in Vietnam, in Korea, in World War II, and on and on. The bell will ring; the candles will be lit, for all our dead. The bell will ring; the candle will be lit, for Lazarus.

And, eventually, for me. And for you. John Dunne said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” Each of us has a candle waiting for us. And one day, your name will be read aloud on All Saints’ Sunday, and the bell will toll.

So, what are we to tell these new Christians we are about to baptize? Will we raise them with a sense of despair? Fatalism? The inevitability and finality of death? “Life’s a bitch, and then you die?” Will that be who we are?

No, of course not. The reading from the Wisdom of Solomon says, “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”

Can we believe that? Really believe that? Can we teach it to these children? I hope so. Can we explain it to these children? I can’t. I don’t have rational explanations. I can’t make it science. I don’t have proofs.

But what I do have is the memory of a primal wail echoing off hospital walls in the middle of the night. And we must tell these children the truth about that wail — that it is real, that we don’t have the answers, the proofs, but that we know that the wail from the foundation of existence that came from that mother — and that has come from so many of us — also came from Jesus. The Son of God wailed the wail of that mother. God knows. And we must also tell these children that God was in that room. And when that baby went to heaven, God held her; God rocked her; God stroked her rosy cheek.

If we tell those truths, then I believe that it will be enough to raise these children —

with our bells — ringing out anguish, joy, faithfulness;

with our candles — shining not to pretend that there is no darkness, but shining to show that the light of Christ can shine in the darkest place — the hospital room, the tomb;

with our faith — that those whom we name today are at peace with God.

It will be enough, and as these children grow up in the midst our bells, our candles, our faith, in the midst of these blessings, they will be blessed, as their brothers and sisters who have gone before them, whose names we read, have been blessed.

Amen.