ALL SAINTS DAY 2020

[cappie]

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, one of the principal feasts in the life of the church. All Saints’ is a day when we recall the enduring beauty of the Saints, and when we profess that, somehow, we are mysteriously bound together with them across time and space and context, by virtue of our common spiritual heritage.

All Saints Day for some is like reflecting upon a family, filled with discrete personalities, each living into their respective lives and callings, and yet bound by shared histories, customs, and relationships. For others, All Saints’ is like a patchwork quilt, carefully stitched together over time. For still others, All Saints’ is like a team, comprised of participants from diverse backgrounds who play their roles in coming together for a common purpose.

None of these images is exhaustive, to be sure Each usher us more deeply into the reality of being “knit together” with the whole company of the faithful, even those who worship God on another shore and in a greater light.

 Over the centuries, the church has identified the lives of the saints as tangible expressions of the beatitudes, of bodies who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who pursue peace. And so, it is fitting that our gospel text on this All Saints’ Day is from the first portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, a section concerned with the enumeration of the beatitudes.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most, if not the most, scrutinized of Jesus’ teachings, likely due to it being his longest sustained discourse in the New Testament. Though Jesus uttered these words millennia ago, they still demand our attention and prayers, to be digested steadily and slowly, as we seek the ways God would have us to go.  

One of the challenges  of the beatitudes is that they can quickly embarrass our well-intentioned pursuits of holiness. For those of us who are not sufficiently poor or persecuted or actively brokering peace, Jesus’ teachings can leave us stuck between the rock of apathy and the hard place of shame – apathetic at our obvious inability to climb the moral mountains of faith, or shameful at our repeated failure for not embodying this new law the sermon prescribes.

What to do with this seemingly inaccessible morality, on which so much moral importance is placed?

Jesus is not after judgment; Jesus is after flourishing. The beatitudes should not be read as primarily about moral obligation, but as signposts of true happiness. In that way, they demarcate our paths as a people of faith, guiding us we go about our days.

Here are the things that make you happy, Jesus says. Take them in. Let them instil hope and enliven and direct your steps, as they have done for countless before you. Trust that the Holy Spirit will guide you on the way. This is precisely what we see over and over in the lives of the saints. We see individuals in their humanity who sought the narrow path of poverty, meekness, mercy, and purity.  

This is simply another way of saying that what is so extraordinary about the saints is the ways in which their ordinary lives unfolded, page by grace-filled page. Telling the saints’ stories are ways to remind ourselves of how God has worked with and will continue to work with generation after generation in the Church

What we can note about Saints is that they come in every shape, size, colour, and age. They are set apart, not by their intelligence, talent, education, work, mother tongue or culture, but by the fact that, like Jesus and Mary, they have accepted their life as a vocation to holiness, an opportunity to receive and spread God's limitless love.

It is a deep and beautiful mystery that this day we count ourselves members of this great family of faith.  We are invited to locate our stories among those of martyrs and confessors from millennia past  and might we be given grace to see them as honest examples of God at work in our midst—and encouragement for the tough task of living this side of heaven.