Dear All,
Yesterday was the Feast of ‘All Saints’ – today is ‘All Souls Day’. This week’s reflections are focused on All Saints – there is plenty of good material. Next week we will look at All Souls – I need a bit more time to get my head round it – for me, a more difficult topic.
Amongst today’s pieces there are some that point us, ourselves, in the direction of becoming a ‘saint’ eventually but, as Joan Chittister points out, the word ‘saint’ carries of a lot with it & can be misleading – stained glass windows, relics, the ‘marshmallow effect’ – whereas surely saints have lots of fight in them, brave, strong women & men. And doubtless we have all known, or do know, women & men who are ‘saints’ but will never get on to the Church’s list.
Our blessing today is ‘My Peace’ from Sacred Dance. Let’s pray that for those ‘saints’ who live around us.
With love to you all
Delight of All the Saints
Joyce Rupp
Holy One,
Your wide heart of exquisite acceptance
holds a special fondness for the saints.
You gather them into your assembly
whether they are grumpy or glad.
You hold them close to your merciful love
in spite of any history of wrongdoing.
You welcome them in your conversions
and assist them in their ways of service.
We are your little saints in the making
in whom you also take great delight.
Joan Chittister on ‘Saints’
The liturgical year has always been a veritable roll-call of people who gave their lives to follow Jesus. The church called them saints. And that’s unfortunate. The word has a foreign ring to it. As Dorothy Day once said, ‘Don’t call me a saint – I don’t want to be dismissed so easily!’ There is something about the word ‘saint’, obviously, that dampens the meaning of the mission. People like these were not marshmallow figures in stained glass windows. They were models, heroes, icons, stars of their times, whose lives made real what scripture could only talk about. They were the worthy and the brave, the simple and the centred ones, who saw the truth and lived it, whatever the cost.
Pope Francis:
The saints were real people whose strength to face daily challenges came from the grace of Jesus Christ, showing that everyone can be holy. The saints of all times, which we all celebrate together today, are not simply symbols, distant human beings, unreachable. On the contrary, they are people who have lived with their feet on the ground. They have experienced the daily toil of existence with its successes and its failures, finding in the Lord the strength to always get up and continue the journey.
The saints demonstrate that holiness is not achieved alone, but is the fruit of the grace of God and of our free response to it.
Holiness is not only a gift from God, it is the common vocation of the disciples of Christ.
Responding to God’s call to be holy, and accepting the gift of his grace, means taking a serious and daily commitment to sanctification in the conditions, duties and circumstances of our life, trying to live everything with love and with charity.
The Church has many examples of how to live with charity, both in the canonized saints in heaven as well as those who live in one’s community, even next door, and are witnesses of holiness.
To Be a Saint
Frederick Buechner
To be a saint is to be human because we were created to be human. To be a saint is to live with courage and self-restraint, but it is more than that. To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness which comes & goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark & terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one’s mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away & yet is always full.