Solemnity of All Saints • Year A

Today we celebrate that special day on the Church’s calendar when we remember the many saints who have passed through our lives and the lives of millions of others. We know many of them, people who loved and showed us the face of Christ through their actions. We know that this web of holiness is deep, even if we don’t know all of its members. This is the communion of sanctity that we celebrate today. It is a manifestation of God’s abundant love towards us that he inspires and makes possible so many saints. It is a confirmation that allowing God’s grace to guide and sustain me, can also lead others, when I am gone, to give thanks that I crossed their path of life.

All Saints Day is when we can give thanks to the God who gave us so many examples of holiness. In the first reading we hear of “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” They “survived the time of great distress” by being faithful to the Lamb who gave his life for us.

We live in times of great distress. We have the stresses that arise when war and violence capture the world’s headlines. We have the stresses that come from making political options this week that are often seen as choosing the least bad. We have the stresses of worrying about the future of jobs and of humanity itself arising from the rapid development of AI. With all of this, we can feel that our lives, or at the very least our times, are rudderless.

This is where the long view, the pilgrimage to holiness, comes in to lift our spirits. The challenge, as the second reading states, is to realize that we are not alone. As the first letter of John says: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.” We are not alone, we are not orphans trying to figure everything out ourselves. We are God’s chosen ones, his children, and he doesn’t abandon us.

Convinced of this, we can then respond so that we too become a blessing in the lives of others. That is the mark of holiness; that is what we give thanks for as we remember the many who have been blessings in our lives.

The Beatitudes that we hear about in the gospel point the way to becoming a blessing for others. They are all directed outside of ourselves. There is no pathway to being “Blessed” that is based on the “me,” on the idea that I decide everything based on what I want, what I desire. If I don’t take myself off my center stage, I eventually am alone, standing in darkness, being increasingly far from the life of the beatitudes, of the multitude of saints that we celebrate today. St John in a few verses after today’s second reading, makes clear the depth of that love and the challenge we face in imitating it to be holy. He says: “Christ laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” That is as far from self-centeredness as one can get. To put others, to put the common good above my own, that is the way to be as Christ, and to be, as the first reading remarks: among the number of those who have been marked with the seal of God.

To be peacemakers, to comfort, to be merciful, to stand up for righteousness and justice in the face of intolerance and self-centeredness, to be willing to pay the price to be faithful to the Lamb who was slain because He did exactly that for all of us, is the path to join the communion of All the Saints.

Let us pause today to give thanks to the many saints in our lives. Let us pause to give thanks for the cloud of holiness that has always accompanied the Church, the People of God. Let us give thanks that in today’s world the Church’s moral compass still can guide us along the path of righteousness and mercy. And let us pray that we have the faith and the strength to mold our lives according to those values, the ones that make us blessed.