Scripture Reflection, November 1, 2009: Solemnity of All Saints

Scripture Readings:
Revelation 7: 2-4, 9-14
Psalm 24: 1-6
1 John 3: 1-3
Matthew 5: 1-12

If you were asked -- “Do you know any holy people?”-- would you be able to name someone? If someone called you “holy” how would that make you feel? I suspect that many of us feel a bit uncomfortable with the word “holy”. We may associate it with people who always have pious looks on their faces, never have a negative thought, and are generally detached from the issues that most of us have to face each day. We may think that holy people live in “another world.” And if someone told us that they thought of us as holy that would probably make us feel ill at ease. It may even give us “the creeps.”

But the funny thing is that in the Scriptures a lot of people are called “holy”, including many people who were far from perfect. The people of Israel wandering in the desert were called a “holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). In the New Testament this same title is given to the Christian community (1 Peter 2: 9), and often these Christians are addressed in letters as “the saints.” In the Bible, God’s people are called holy because they belong to the holy God. It is not that they were always perfect; in fact, we know that many of them were far from perfect and often needed to be called to conversion. But holiness involved a deepening realization of who they were and (even more importantly) whose they were. God’s people were called to remember that they belonged to God, they were God’s special possession and very dear to God. Their lives as a community and as individuals belonged to God.

This Sunday the Church celebrates the Solemnity of All Saints. It sets aside the day of November 1 to remember all the saints, both those officially recognized as such (men and women who have been “canonized”) and those known only to God. There are many anonymous saints who form part of the great multitude of witnesses about whom we hear in the Book of Revelation. These saints are ever close to us, especially at the celebration of the Eucharist. There are always more people present with us at the Eucharist than those we can see with our physical eyes. I suspect that each of us can think of deceased loved ones who have touched our lives and who form part of this “cloud of witnesses” that we celebrate on All Saints Day. They are quiet, faithful, supportive companions to us as we try to respond to Jesus’ call to discipleship. By their lives, they have given us a glimpse of the face of God. The Opening Prayer for this liturgy says it well: “God our Father, source of all holiness, the work of your hands is manifest in your saints, the beauty of your truth is reflected in their faith.”

As followers of Jesus, each one of us is called to holiness. The Second Vatican Council, in its great constitution on the Church, emphasized this universal call. It spoke of this vocation to holiness as a call to the “perfection of love.” Holiness is all about a deepening realization that we belong to the God whose love exceeds our wildest imaginings and learning to reflect God’s tenacious love in our relationships with others.

When we honor “all” the saints, we recognize that holiness is not a single, uniform reality. There are certain family resemblances among holy people, especially those dispositions that Jesus speaks about in this Sunday’s gospel: humility, mercy, the thirst for righteousness, purity of heart, peacemaking, courage in the face of persecution. But these qualities, and all of the Christian virtues, are learned and expressed through the marvelous variety of people who strive to reflect God’s love in their lives. For us, too, our response to the call to holiness is enfleshed through our unique personalities and the particular circumstances of our lives.

Even with all of these differences, there does seem to be a common starting point – the place where all of us must begin in answering the call to holiness. That place is the everyday – the everyday of our lives. This is the place where we learn to be loving people. That is the place where the famous and not-so-famous saints began their own journeys to holiness.

Sounds kind of simple, doesn’t it? Begin with the everyday: I can do that. No theological rocket science here. But I suspect that sometimes we would rather not start with the everyday, with the ordinary stuff of our lives. We might prefer more spectacular manifestations of holiness, like those we hear about in the lives of certain saints. We would prefer a spiritual version of winning the 7th game of the World Series with a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. It is always tempting to equate holiness with the extraordinary.

The everyday sounds simple, but it is often so tough, so challenging. It is the routine of getting up in the morning and trying to respond to the same people we see all the time. It is the challenge of dealing with our own fluctuating moods and those of others. The everyday involves interacting with that person whom I would so like to change but whom I cannot change. It is meeting deadlines and completing assignments, with the joys of success and the disappointments of failure. The everyday is comprised of small acts of understanding and forgiveness and learning how to say, “I’m sorry”. It is grappling with the prejudices we often form about others. It is the challenge of trying to be patient and compassionate with those who tend to drive us crazy. It is telling the Lord each day that we want to serve him and to do his will, as best we can understand that. Growing in holiness – in the perfection of love – takes place in and through all of these everyday, far-from-extraordinary, moments in our lives.

But the everyday is something else as well. It is comprised of what the author of the Second Letter of John tells us in this Sunday’s second reading. It is a deepening realization of the love that Father has bestowed upon us in Christ – a love that enables us to be called children of God. And that is precisely who we are. As this same letter says, we do not know exactly what we will be in the future. We do not know exactly what we will look like when God has finished fashioning us into the particular expression of holiness to which he is calling us. But each day, every day, we are invited to catch another glimpse of the love the Father has bestowed on us in Christ Jesus. This is the love that makes us his daughters and sons. And that is where we must always begin. We are invited to begin each day with a renewed awareness of the dignity we have been given in Christ and to strive to live out of that dignity.

We gather around the altar every Sunday in communion with all the saints. In the wonderful gift of the Eucharist Christ gives us the strength to live the “everyday” of our lives as his follower, as a child of God who seeks to grow toward the perfection of love. Christ himself consecrates our everyday. No day, then, is really ordinary, because each day is filled with his presence.

Fr. Robin Ryan, cp