Dear Friends,
There are saints in our windows. There are saints above our side altars and on their pedestals. Saints greet you in our entryways, sometimes hidden if the lights are not on. Some of our saints share an alcove together that they would have never shared in life – Patrick, Lucy and Philomena. Saints surround us at Cabrini, and our school bears the name of today’s feast – All Saints.
All those images, our Catholic tradition teaches, remind us that we are surrounded by friends who bear us up. In some mysterious way—through humble paint and wood and glass and stone—they usher us past themselves into a community of saints who, in their greater nearness to the presence of God, are more alive than we are. We are taught that those images are windows into heaven. And then, heaven can look back, the cloud of witnesses lifting their hearts with ours as we pray.
Those many images give our human flesh the assurance that we are truly surrounded by a large company of heroes who have walked the same journey we are on. Today we honor all those people we have known who have gone before us to heaven but will never appear in the Church’s Calendar of Saints. The saints you have known were not perfect people. Sainthood is not about some work of becoming perfect. Saints are not people who mysteriously evaded all temptation, but rather, people who have confronted and are not afraid of their own sinfulness. They have given themselves over to the mercy of God. They know the look of Jesus as he forgives them of their sins. Freed by Jesus they were able to embrace their brokenness and offer to others that same experience of mercy. A heaven filled with such souls is a happy place, I believe, a place where we don’t have to wear a mask, where we can truly be the person God created us to be in all our uniqueness. And know that we are loved, whole, united within, by God.
Future saints surround us as well at Cabrini. They sit next to us in our pew, they sing in our choir, they read from the Lectionary at our Masses, they smile and welcome us as we come to church, they surround us and help us to know that we are not on the journey of discipleship by ourselves. Together with saints in heaven and those on earth the Kingdom of heaven is made real today, now.
Happy All Saints Day!
Fr. Damian