Today, All Saints Day, the Church calls us to remember our primary duty and privilege during this life: to become saints. This is no metaphor or vague invitation, but rather an immediate call to make every effort to become mirrors of the Father’s face in this world, and become like him. We all have a hunger that can be satisfied by nobody else by him, and we yearn to know him. Today we honour our brothers and sisters, whose faces we know and voices we recognise. The Saints are people the Church now recognises as alive in Heaven as Saints, and today we hear, particularly clearly, the call to follow in their footsteps.
Created to live with God in his own kingdom, and yet unable to fully know or predict what that will be like, we find ourselves straining to imagine a future life which even Jesus Christ himself is unable to communicate plainly to us in the Gospel accounts (see Luke 13:18-21). Recognising and validating this struggle of ours, St John consoles us, explaining that “My dear people, we are already the children of God, but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he really is.” We know what we long for, and can trust that we will be prepared to receive this when our heavenly Father decides the time is right. One day, we will look on him and recognise him as our loving Father and Creator. In other words, he will make us Saints.
Today, on this great solemnity, the Church shines a spotlight on these brothers and sisters of ours and encourages us, with great joy, to set our sights on the brilliant horizon in front of us and to continue to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith,” (Hebrews 12:1-3).
In today’s Mass, the Church sings “Let us all rejoice in the Lord, as we celebrate the feast day in honour of all the Saints, at whose festival the Angels rejoice and praise the Son of God.” Today is a day of rejoicing, along with the Angels, at a work that has been completed, a victory secured, a life won for heaven. Why is it important that we hear these words? Because this is also our destiny. There is a watch party waiting to launch into celebration the moment a single one of us enters into Heaven. In may different ways, this destiny is written on our hearts, and in another part of the Mass the Church speaks to the Father on our behalf, pleading for “an abundance of the reconciliation with you for which we earnestly long.”
Whatever we do for a living, whatever immediate duties and responsibilities we have, everything contributes towards our progress towards this, and we encounter this “longing,” on a daily basis. It is the Father who invites us to let him make holy everything we touch, every work we carry out, every experience we gain during our earthly lives. There is not a single occupation or state of life that God does not plan to use to make us Saints, mirrors of himself in the world.
So how can we create space for him to come in and do this work in us?
The first step is to realise how close Heaven is to us. Heaven is not located in some far-off galaxy, but rather, as Jesus explains, “[The kingdom of God] is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flower till it was leavened all through,” (Luke 13:20-21). The kingdom of heaven is thoroughly integrated, mixed in with us, and its workers (the saints and angels are very busy helping us to get to Heaven. As soon as we realise the proximity of God’s kingdom, we are powerfully encouraged.
The secular world might describe this as merely ‘adopting a positive mindset’, but the reality goes much further than that: by recognising the action and presence of what is seemingly invisible to us, we allow God’s Spirit, like the yeast in Jesus’ parable, to enter more deeply and immediately into us and do His work.
So how can we create space for him to come in and do this work in us?
The second step is to listen to, and treasure, the teachings the Holy Spirit of God gives us about the Saints through the Church’s words. In Lumen Gentium (1964) the Church declared that it “accepts loyally the venerable faith of our ancestors in the living communion which exists between us and our sisters and brothers who are in the glory of heaven…”
This guides us directly to another important step we must take: we must stop seeing ourselves as individuals, and rather accept that we are all very closely connected. Not only are the Saints working with us to strengthen us in our growth and journey, but their very love for God and their faith strengthens our own. Such is the closeness between us. Jesus rarely speaks about the saints as individuals, but rather as parts of his own body. A saint is a part of God. “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” (John 15:5). Just as the Holy Spirit, through Lumen Gentium, teaches us that the Saints’ faith strengthens our own faith through our communion in Jesus Christ, hence the more we allow Jesus to draw us to himself, actual grace (defined by the Church as a supernatural push or encouragement from God) will flow through us to others.
This connectedness between us in God is at the heart of the Church’s Sacramental life and its redemptive work. As explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “[the Sacrament of Penance] does not simply heal the one restored to ecclesial communion, but has also a revitalising effect on the life of the Church which suffered from the sin of one of her members,” (CCC 1469). This means that God has gifted us the enormous privilege of collaborating with the Saints in obtaining more grace, more strength and encouragement, for our brothers and sisters by participating fully in the Sacraments. Our free will only applies to us individually, but by freely choosing to co-operate with God’s plan, the fruits the Holy Spirit grows is us will bring nourishment to many.
The call to become Saints is neither complicated, nor beyond us. We have the examples of Saints of all ages, of all walks of life, to encourage us. Children and adults, men and women, academics and the unschooled, all of them now rush joyfully to our side to lift up our heads and urge us onwards towards the inheritance prepared for us by our Father in heaven. Jesus waits for us eagerly, continually echoing the request he made to the Father before he was crucified, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am,” (John 17:24). We know the faces of our brothers and sisters in heaven, and if we allow God to be at the helm of our lives, then our faces will join theirs in the record books that will encourage generations of young Saints to come.
In this life, we are called first to be Saints.
