Solemnity of All Saints

It always seems to me that there is a kind of a special appeal to this feast of All Saints. Somehow or other it always seems to be just a little bit more festive than some of the other Holydays of Obligation. I suppose there are a number of reasons for that. Perhaps, in part at least, it is because the roots of the feast are in an ancient pagan harvest festival, connected with what we now celebrate as Halloween, and maybe a bit of that sense of mystery, of importance, simply at the change of seasons lingers on in us. Perhaps too it is because All Saints in a way sort of ushers in the Christian holiday season. In a few weeks we will celebrate Thanksgiving, and then Advent, and Christmas and New Years.

But perhaps too it is just the universality, the inclusiveness of All Saints that appeals to us. After all, we are celebrating not some clearly heroic single person or accomplishment, that stands out as something extraordinary, distinct from the lives of the rest of us. Rather we are celebrating something with which we can really pretty readily identify, that great gathering of people who over the years, over the centuries, have faithfully and patiently tried to lead a Christian life. People who have tried to build their lives, their world, around the teaching and example of Christ. People who have been willing to simply take Christ's word for the way life is supposed to be lived.

And it is good to remind ourselves that indeed there is a great gathering of such people. For some reason, there seems to be something almost perverse in us that prompts us to give much more attention to people's vices and weaknesses, than to their virtue and strength. You have only got to read a paper, or watch the news on television to see how true that is. And the danger of all of that, I suppose, is that we can come away from such exposure ready to believe that vice and weakness really is much more typical of humanity than is virtue and strength.

But it isn't. The truth of the matter is that human lives are far more clearly marked with goodness than with evil, and that in every age, in every place, despite undeniably real set-backs from time to time, the Hand of God is surely in motion, shaping human lives into a clearer, sharper image of His own. The truth of the matter is that the world is full of saints, good people leading good lives, and doing so without reward, or recognition, or praise, or any such thing. Doing so simply because it is right to do so. And that, above everything else, is the hallmark of saintliness. Doing what is right not because it is profitable or pleasant or popular, but because it is right. Such people are the majority, they always have been. And there is a consolation to be drawn from that, I think, a confidence to be taken in it. We live in a world strongly marked by goodness, by good people.

But there is another confidence to be drawn from the feast of All Saints, a confidence that is really an invitation. As others have done, so can we. Goodness is the mark of really quite ordinary people. Impossibly demanding as Christian living can seem to be, in fact it isn't. And that is a good thing to keep in mind, I think, as we hear read the Beatitudes in this morning's Gospel. I doubt that there is a more far-fetched sounding passage in all of Scripture, unless it be the rest of this fifth chapter of Matthew, in which Christ gives a very concrete description of how He expects His people to act. It all sounds too ideal. To be humble, to be poor, to be forgiving, to value righteousness above gain, or popularity, or power. It sounds impossible, too far beyond the reach of ordinary day-to-day people, up to their ears in day-to-day struggles. But it isn't. It is a real way of life that has been lived by real people, millions of them, and successfully so. The fullness of sainthood, Heaven, is our real future. That too must be part of our celebration today. No attempt at goodness that we make, even if it doesn't seem to be immediately successful, is ever wasted. There is a great reward for saintliness, one that is well within our reach.

Those men and women that have over the centuries been singled out in our Church's tradition, and named as saints, were, in fact, exactly like you and I. They had no grace or power beyond that of Baptism, a grace shared equally by all of God's people. If the saints had been sort of other-worldly supermen, their lives wouldn't mean anything to us. But they weren't. The feast of All Saints is equally the feast of All Sinners. As someone once put it, a saint is a sinner who keeps trying not to be.

And I think that is a good emphasis to make. It is to easy for us to image holiness, saintliness, as a kind of serene perfection, a state of being that somehow transcends, remains untouched, unruffled by the challenges, the temptations, the messiness of the real world. It isn't that. To be holy is to very explicitly live in the real world, with all of its imperfections, to face it head on, take it in stride, even if a good many of those strides turn out to be stumbles. Ultimately, that really doesn't matter. Ultimately the world is God's not ours. And if it doesn't always function the way we think it should, if it doesn't always meet our expectations, or if we should fail to meet those of others, that is inconvenient, it may even be uncomfortable. But it is no more than that.

And I really think something like that is the heart of saintliness. It is indeed God's world, and if we live in it on His terms, nothing else really matters, at least not very much. Those who do that are the poor in spirit, the gentle, the comforters, those who hunger for justice, the merciful. The Beatitudes really are God's terms for living in His world. They won't make you powerful, or famous, or rich. But they will make you a saint.

Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12