We Are All Called to Holiness
Homily for All Saints – 3 November 2024
Today we celebrate the solemnity of All Saints, meaning all the known canonised saints and the countless number of men and women who have reached heaven and yet are not given individual recognition. We remember that we are called to join them; that God intends for us to be saints. The purpose of this celebration is to make us desire in the depths of our hearts to become saints. Let’s decide here and now, today, that we want to become saints, and then do everything we can, put all our efforts, all our attention, into allowing God to make us saints. So many of the great saints decided early on in their lives that they wanted to be saints.
We are fortunate to have had canonised saints in our own time, like Pope St John Paul or Mother Teresa, or Pope St Paul VI or Blessed Benedict Daswa or St John Henry Newman. Recently, we were given our first millennial saint, Blessed Carlo Acutis, who was born in 1991 and died at the age of 15 in 2006.
These saints who have lived in our lifetime and whom we may know of through the media, might give as an understanding of what it means to be a saint. Similarly, when you are asked to think about the saints, great saints from the past, like St Francis of Assisi, St Augustine, St Teresa of Avila, or St Paul and the other Apostles, might come to mind.
Now, it is true that today’s feast is about these great men and women of faith, but the danger could be that we might think of these men and women as being so far removed from us, so unlike us, that we have very little in common with them, or even worse that we could never be like them. We might end up celebrating All Saints as a feast only of those great men and women of faith and not of simple people like us.
But this is not correct. We are made of the same raw humanity that the saints are made of. When we celebrate this feast of All Saints we are celebrating our destiny as human beings, individually and as a whole people. This feast of All Saints tells us that the Christian life is possible, because many have lived it successfully. We should believe and say with St Augustine, who used to say often in reference to the saints: “If them, ...why not me too?”
A saint is someone who is holy. And we are all called to holiness - everyone of us, without exception. Holiness is not just for an exceptional group of people, priests or religious, or monks or nuns. Every single person, man, woman and child, young and old is called to holiness; it is the universal call to holiness, the purpose of our creation and existence. We become saints through being faithful to God in the very ordinary circumstances of life in which we find ourselves. Our immediate context, our family, our work, our community, gives us the means to become saints.
The old catechism which many of us learned as children taught that that God made us to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next. In this simple text we see our call to be saints. We were created for an eternal love relationship with God. Perhaps we need to convince ourselves that we want to go to heaven. And once we have done that, we need to live in such a way that we will achieve that goal. We need to live according to that purpose already now. The greatest tragedy for us human beings would be for us not to be saints. The Lord wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence.
The saints urge us towards the goal of heaven. Saints may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones; people who we have known and loved in this life. Their lives may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.
There are two possible pitfalls in our quest to become saints. The first would be if we were somehow to think that it is entirely up to us whether become saints or not; in other words, that we have to do all the work. In reality, God is the one who makes us holy; all we have to do is cooperate. This is summed beautifully in the message of Pope Francis one Lent, when he said, ‘This Lent, give God permission to make you into a saint.” We need to invite God to this work in us; we need to cooperate with God’s grace to become saints.
The second pitfall would be to think that it is too late for us to become saints; that we have messed up in the past; that our track record excludes us from the possibility of being saints. In truth, as they say, “every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” It is never too late for us to allow God to make us into saints.
The first reading for the Mass this Sunday, from the Book of Revelation, gives us a snapshot of the life of heaven with all the saints. In this vision there are a great multitude of people from every nation, tribe, and language. They are dressed in white robes and are participating in a heavenly liturgy, giving praise and worship to God. Our Eucharist here today is a foretaste and preparation for this heavenly liturgy which we are called to participate in. The Eucharist is the food of saints.
The second reading from the First Letter of St John speaks of the present and the future: St John repeats twice that we are God’s children already but says what we will be in the future we do not know, except that we will be like Jesus. St John goes on to say what is needed to be like Jesus in the future: We must purify ourselves as Jesus is pure. In other words, we must strive for holiness.
The Gospel for this Mass, in the Beatitudes, gives us a programme for holiness. Pope Francis says that Jesus, in himself, and in his teaching in the Beatitudes, shows us how to become saints. In fact, Pope Francis says the Beatitudes are the identity card of the saints, and they are meant to be our identity card as Christians who are saints in the making.
These Beatitudes challenge our selfishness, our complacency, and our pride. This teaching of Jesus should unsettle us, challenge us and demand a real change in the way we live. These Beatitudes are a call for us to recognise our complete dependence on God. In and of ourselves we are poor in spirit, and we need God. Nothing other than God can satisfy our deepest longing and desires. The saint is the one who has realised that the pursuit of worldly pleasures and material wealth is not the source of our happiness.
The mourning of saints is about having compassion for those who suffer, and the call to be meek is the opposite of pride and vanity, and being filled with self-importance. Saints do not seek honour and glory for themselves. Saints have simple, humble hearts. Saints desire and work for justice for the poor and the weak; they speak for those who have no voice.
Saints are merciful. Having experienced God’s mercy, they are merciful to others; they give, help, and serve; they forgive and understand the weaknesses of others. Saints have pure hearts, hearts that are undivided, hearts that are set on the one thing necessary. Saints are peacemakers. They avoid being the cause of conflict and misunderstanding and work for healing and understanding between others.
If this seems daunting and overwhelming, and it should, we do not despair or give up. The power of the Holy Spirit enables us to do this. Pope Francis says, when you feel the temptation to dwell on your own weakness, raise your eyes to Christ crucified and say: “Lord, I am a poor sinner, but you can work the miracle of making me a little bit better”.