“For all the saints who from their labors rest,/Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,/Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed./Alleluia, Alleluia!”
Many masses in English today will include this familiar hymn, “For All the Saints.” Today is the Feast of All Saints. The “All Saints” in today’s celebration includes ALL the more than 10,000 canonized saints in the Catholic Church, as well as the unknown millions/billions of unofficial saints.
What is the difference in an official saint and an unofficial one? An official saint is a person whose holy life included something that gained the attention of the Church so that the person was officially named “Saint.” In early centuries this naming could be done from a basis of a variety of circumstances—from martyrdom to attributed miracles to contribution to the life of the church to popular acclaim of known holiness. Today, it takes a thorough process of examination and must include at least two verified and otherwise unexplained miracles that came from prayer to the saint-to-be.
Unofficial saints are people who are just as present in the court of heaven as St. Peter, St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Teresa of Calcutta. They are people who died ready to enter heaven at the moment of their death or people who have passed through all necessary post-death purification to enter, face-to-face, into the Presence of God.
The unofficial saints likely include our family members and friends who have gone to be with God. They will, hopefully, include ALL of us someday. Someday, November 1 will be OUR feast day. Without an official designation from the Church, we can’t know for sure if someone is in heaven, but we do know that ALL the citizens of heaven ARE SAINTS.
The Scene in Revelation
The first reading today is from St. John’s Revelation. In this part of the his vision he sees both a multitude of 144,000 “children of Israel” and “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” St. John saw “ALL the Saints.” All are praising God. All are wearing white robes because they have “washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.” In other words, ALL the citizens of heaven are there because Jesus Christ, God Himself, chose to experience human death and overcome it. The grace of God, flowing from that Divine Mercy, saves us and gives us entrance.
Yet, too, we are to “survive the time of great distress,” that is, we are to endure and overcome the distresses of persecution or even pressure from culture to give up our Christian beliefs and standards.
Revelation was written during a time of severe persecution. Its purpose was to both purify the churches of that time and to strengthen Christians to see beyond the trials of their faith to the eternal glory that awaited them.
There are many Christians under threat of death today. In fact, I have read in numerous places that a Christian is statistically more likely to be martyred today than at any other time in history. True, today, martyrdom is a real threat to Christians mostly in places where English is not the first language, but, considering how quickly life can radically change (look at the lesson of COVID), that could all change in a heartbeat. A sobering thought.
Standards of Heavenly Citizenship
Our Gospel today is the familiar Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Through most of my life I was confused by the Beatitudes. I wasn’t sure what “poor in Spirit” or “meek” or “clean of heart” meant. The standards, generally, seemed other worldly—not possible to live.
One Lent I took up the task to try to understand them. I found three books about the Beatitudes by well-know spiritual writers. I discovered that the three authors often had very different interpretations of what the Beatitudes meant. I remained confused.
Then, as I came to love the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7 in Matthew), I read the Beatitudes as fulfilling and going beyond the Ten Commandments. So, why aren’t the Beatitudes the basic standards for Christians instead of the Ten Commandments?
St. Pope John Paul II answers that question in his encyclical, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). He tells that the BASIC rules of behavior remain the Ten Commandments, but the Beatitudes are the attitudes and dispositions which indirectly flow from the Commandments. They are “above all promises, from which there also indirectly flow normative indications for the moral life. In their originality and profundity they are a sort of self-portrait of Christ, and for this very reason are invitation to discipleship and to communion of life with Christ.” (paragraph 16)
As St. John Paul goes on to say in the next paragraph, “the moral demands of the commandments represent the absolutely essential ground in which the desire for perfection can take root and more, that is, for the meaning of the commandments to be completely fulfilled in following Christ.” (paragraph 17).
The Vision and What We Are Now
In the first letter of John, he writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.”
Thus, in today’s readings, we have two visions to help us believe enough through our own times of trial in the glory of the Resurrection that we can endure. One is the vision of the white robed throngs living in “beatitude,” that is, within the Presence and the Life of God—Heaven.
The second vision is that of how we perfect our faith from “the law” to becoming like Christ. Christ LIVED the beatitudes. We are to follow him to grow to be poor in spirit, mournful of sin, meek, merciful, hungry for goodness, clean of heart, peacemakers, AND accepting of persecution. The Beatitudes are the standards of Christian perfection. And Christian perfection is living life from God’s point of view—the view of heaven. The life of a saint.
Prayer:
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground. Thank you for the visions you give today of heaven and heavenly life. Thank you for saying “You are God’s children NOW,” for that helps me understand that, even though the standards of the Beatitudes are high standards, as Your child, they are the standards You set for me as part of Your family. They are not the standards of the world around me, Lord. Or the standards by which I always evaluate my heart. Lead me, guide me, Lord, to grow toward Beatitude, to grow toward heaven.
