Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Author: Father Pat Mulcahy

  • Saint Cecilia, Virgin Martyr

    Saint Cecilia, Virgin Martyr

    For those of you who are musicians, whether you play an instrument or sing, this is your feast day. Today we celebrate Saint Cecilia, a virgin and martyr of the early church who is the patron saint of musicians.

    Saint Cecilia was a force for good among those who knew her. She worked hard to convert as many as she could to the faith, and before her death, is said to have converted at least four hundred people. She was born to a rich family, and promised in marriage to a youth named Valerian. She prayed, fasted, and wore sackcloth, beseeching the saints and angels to guard her virginity.

    During her wedding ceremony, she was said to have sung in her heart to God, which, of course, is why she became the patroness of musicians. Before the consummation of the marriage, she informed Valerian of her vow of virginity and that she had an angel protecting her. He wanted to see the angel as proof. She said he would see the angel after he was baptized, which he was by Pope Urbanus. Returning, he found the angel at her side. Valerian’s brother Tibertius heard of the angel and his brother’s baptism, and he asked to be baptized too.

    After their baptisms, Cecila went about preaching and calling people to baptism, and Valerian and Tibertius would each day bury the saints who were murdered by the prefect of the city. Eventually Valerian and Tibertius were arrested and executed by the prefect after they refused to make sacrifice to pagan gods. Eventually Cecilia was arrested and condemned, although it took three attempts to put her to death.

    Saint Cecilia’s life and death put the obligation of evangelization on the front burner. If she could evangelize four hundred people at the eventual cost of her own life, can we witness to the faith with our life, and invite people to come to know Jesus by reflecting him in what we say and do? Saint Cecilia may be the patroness of musicians, but I think she can be said to be the patroness of evangelization as well.

    Saint Cecilia, pray for us.

  • Tuesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I just love this story about Zacchaeus! In particular, there are two main components of the story that really stand out for me as hallmarks of the spiritual life.

    The first is Zacchaeus’s openness. First, he is so eager to see Jesus that he climbs up a tree to get a look at him. We don’t have to go that far. All we have to do is spend some time in the Adoration Chapel, or even just some quiet moments reflecting on Scripture, or meditative prayer, even participating in Mass. All of those are ways to see Jesus, but like Zacchaeus, we have to overcome obstacles to get a look at him. For Zacchaeus, that meant climbing up a tree to overcome the fact that he was apparently vertically challenged! But for you and me, that might mean clearing our schedule, making our time with Jesus a priority. Zacchaeus’s openness also included inviting Jesus in, despite his sinfulness. He was willing to make up for his sin and change everything once he found the Lord. We might ask ourselves today what we need to change, and how willing we are to invite Jesus into our lives, despite our brokenness.

    The second thing that stands out for me is what Jesus says to those who chided him for going into a sinner’s house. “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.” What wonderful words those are for us to hear. Because we know how lost we have been at times, and how far we have wandered from our Lord. But the Lord seeks us out anyway, because we are too valuable for him to lose.

    And all we have to do is to be open to the Lord’s work in our lives, just like Zacchaeus was. What a joy it will be then to hear those same words Jesus said to him: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

  • Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    You know, this Gospel reading is filled with all sorts of off-putting comments, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I bristle at the thought of comparing God to a dishonest judge! But that’s not the point here. Of course, Jesus means that God is so much greater than the dishonest judge, that if the dishonest judge will finally relent to someone pestering him, how much more will God, who loves us beyond anything we can imagine, how much more will he grant the needs of this children who come to him in faith?

    But people have trouble with this very issue all the time. Because I am sure that almost all of us have been in the situation where we have prayed and prayed and prayed and nothing seems to happen. But we can never know the reason for God’s delay. Maybe what we ask isn’t right for us right now – or ever. Maybe something better is coming our way, or at least something different. Maybe the right answer will position itself in time, through the grace of God at work in so many situations. Most likely, we just don’t have the big picture, which isn’t ours to have, really.

    But whatever the reason, the last line of the Gospel today is our key: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” And that’s why we have this particular Gospel reading at this late date in the Church year. As the days of Ordinary Time draw to a close, we find it natural to think of the end of time. We don’t know when the end of time will come; Jesus made that clear – nobody knows but the Father. But when it does come, please God let there be faith on earth. Let that great day find us living our faith and living the Gospel and loving one another.

  • Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    So many religious people tend to get concerned about the end of time. Some years ago, there was a serious of books called Left Behind, and a couple of movies made from them. If you didn’t see them, believe me, you didn’t miss anything. The premise was that Jesus returned to take all the faithful people home, and “left behind” everyone else. It’s a notion known as the rapture, which is not taught by the Catholic Church, because it was never revealed in Scripture or Tradition. In fact, no Christian denomination taught this until the late nineteenth century, so despite being a popular notion, at least among those who clamored after that series of books, it is not an authentic teaching.

    I mention this because you might hear today’s Gospel and think of the rapture. But Jesus is really talking about the final judgment, which we hear of often in the readings during these waning days of the Church year. In the final judgment, we will all come before the Lord, both as nations and as individuals. Here those who have made a decision to respond to God’s gifts of love and grace will be saved, and those who have rejected these gifts will be left to their own devices, left to live outside God’s presence for eternity.

    So concern about when this will happen – which Jesus tells us nobody knows – is a waste of time. Instead, we have to be concerned about responding to God’s gift and call in the here-and-now. John tells us how to do that in today’s first reading: “Let us love one another.” This is not, as he points out, a new commandment; indeed, Jesus commanded this very clearly, and pointed out that love of God and neighbor is the way that we can be sure that we are living all of the law and the prophets.

    The day of our Lord’s return will indeed take us all by surprise. We’ll all be doing what we do; let’s just pray that we’re all doing what we’re supposed to do: love one another.

  • Thursday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Yesterday, I was reading an article about a Christian evangelical movement called the New Apostolic Revelation who claim that president-elect Trump is a leader in a spiritual battle against the forces of evil in our nation. The notion that any person would have that role is obviously blasphemous, anti-biblical, and at odds with centuries of Church teaching.

    But it also illustrates the point of today’s Gospel reading. I think there is this underlying ache in human nature that wants to know where everything is headed. We worry, understandably, about the future and what it holds for us. So we want to know that someone is in charge and want to know what that someone is doing to set all these things right.

    And so when someone says, “Look, there he is” or “Look, here he is” we want to believe that that’s the case and have our sense of security filled. But that’s not how this life works. We don’t get to see the big picture, we only see what God needs us to see right now. And I have to believe that that’s a good thing anyway, since I don’t think any of us could survive seeing what God sees, seeing that big picture.

    So we have to, I think, be scrupulously discriminating about what we hear and see, and especially about what voices we follow. We are easily led astray, but we never are if the only voice we are paying attention to is the voice of Our Lord, who, in his own words, is “The Way, the Truth, and the Life.” No one comes to the Father except through him.

    So, as Jesus advises in our Gospel today, do not go off, do not run in pursuit, don’t be led astray by voices of this world leading you one way or the other. Listen to the Gospel, live the Gospel, and by that Gospel come to know the Lord so intimately that you’ll never wander in the wrong direction. That’s the only answer to the uncertainty of our time, or of any time.

    Remember, the Kingdom of God is here, right now, and we need to be living in such a way that no one will see anything in us other than Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  • The Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings
    Lectio Brevis because of a seminarian speaker at Mass.

    Today in our Liturgy of the Word we have an urgent call for us all to let go of the paltry things we are holding onto and go all-in for the kingdom of God.

    Look at what he said the widow did. She put into the treasury a small amount, but it was all she had: Jesus says, “but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.” Not so different from that is the sacrifice of the widow of Zarephath in the first reading. Elijah had prophesied a drought over all of the Land, God’s punishment for the wicked acts of their kings. And so water and food were in scarce supply, and God sends Elijah to the widow. She’s just about to use up the last of her flour and oil to cook a final meal for herself and her son, when Elijah meets her and asks her to make him some food. He encourages her to trust God, and when she does by giving all that she has, she finds God faithful to feed all of them for some time.

    So I’d like to suggest that both of these widows had given everything for their relationship with God. They trusted Him with their very lives by giving everything had to give. It’s a super-scary thing to do, isn’t it? We are people who love to be in control of our lives and of our situations, and so giving up all of that gives us more than a little pause. But honestly, it takes that kind of a leap of faith to get into heaven. If we still are grasping onto stuff, then our hands are full, and we cannot receive from God the gifts and the grace he wants to give us.

    Look at the cross. That, friends, is the prime example of giving everything. And our God did that for us. Jesus gave everything he had by giving his life, suffering the pain of death that we might be forgiven of our sins and attain the blessings of heaven. God is faithful and so he will not leave us in our poverty when we give everything for him.

    But here’s an important message: the time is short. The Church gives us this reading very purposely on the third-to-last Sunday of the Church year for a reason. Because if we’re still hanging onto the stuff that keeps us bound to this life, we are going to miss our invitation to eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. To get to heaven, we have to choose our relationship with God over everything else in our lives. Everything. We have to empty our hands of all this earthly wealth so that we might obtain heavenly wealth. We have to give everything we have for our God who gave everything to us and for us, or we’ll be left out. Hell is truly having nothing, not even Christ, and that’s real poverty. So we need to model our lives after the example of the widows in our readings today, giving everything, so that we might have Christ who is everything we need.





  • Friday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the School Children.

    There’s an old joke that one day, Jesus returned to earth, and was walking around the Vatican square talking to people. Some of the Cardinals noticed and they got together and decided they should probably tell the Pope what was going on. So they went to the Pope’s office in the Vatican and said to him, “Your holiness! Our Lord has returned to earth and he is walking around Saint Peter’s square talking to people! What should we do?” Without even thinking, the Pope said, “Look busy!”

    That joke came to mind when I was thinking about today’s readings. In our first reading, Saint Paul is talking about the people in the Christian community who aren’t living as Christians. They are doing whatever they want, getting right at other people’s expense, and doing all sorts of immoral, earthly things. He tells them the need to get busy about remembering that their true home is in heaven and that they need to live in such a way as to get there.

    In the parable that Jesus tells in the Gospel reading today, the steward thinks that he’s busy about all the right things, making money for himself, until the day he finds out he’s about to be fired because someone has reported him for squandering the rich man’s property. It’s a confusing parable, but we have to remember that in the parable, God is the rich man, and we are the steward who is about to be fired. We need to be smart about remembering that we are children of light, and that light is God. We have to be smart about remembering where we are truly going, and that is to the joy of heaven. We have to be smart about what giving ourselves fully to the right person is all about, and that person is to Jesus.

    And we have to get busy about doing all this because it’s urgent. Time is running short. The days are shorter now and the end of the year is coming. This reminds us that time as a whole is always running shorter, and the time for Jesus to really return and take us with him is getting nearer all the time. We want to go with Jesus, so we don’t dare squander our time doing all the wrong things and being loyal to the wrong sort of people who don’t care anything about our spiritual well-being. We have to do the things that get us closer to Jesus: taking up our crosses, spending time with him in prayer, reading about him in Scripture, serving him by serving others, loving him by loving all the people he puts in our lives.

    When Jesus finds us busy doing all the right things, he can lead us to the place we all want to go one day, and that is to the kingdom of his Heavenly Father. We can’t be distracted though, we need to be focused on where he is taking us.

    This can be hard work sometimes, I know. And that reminds me of a real story about a real pope that I once heard. This is about Pope Saint John XXIII. He was an old man when he was elected pope, but he didn’t waste any time getting things done for the Lord. He was always busy about making the Church better so that people could come to know the Lord. And, at the end of the day, when he was very tired, he would say to Jesus: “Okay Lord. I’m tired and it’s your Church. Take care of it while I sleep.” And Jesus did.

    So, today, let’s all look busy. Knowing that Jesus wants to take us to his Heavenly Father, and it could be time to do that any time. We don’t want to waste our time: we want to be ready.

  • The Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was in seminary, I had a Scripture professor who, when someone would make an insightful comment or answer a question correctly, would exclaim, quoting Jesus in today’s Gospel reading, “You are not far from the kingdom of God!” That comment, made to the scribe at the end of the reading, is an amazing thing to hear Jesus say, because he was always berating the scribes and Pharisees for not getting it, for being so concerned about dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” of the law, that they totally missed the spirit of the law. Jesus always maintained that they were going to completely miss out on the kingdom of God because of this blindness. So here is a scribe who actually gets it, who knows what the first of all of the commandments is. But somehow, in the tone of his congratulatory statement, I think Jesus is throwing in a bit of a challenge to the scribe: now that you know it, it’s time to live it.

    The way it plays out, of course, is typical of the way we see the religious establishment interacting with Jesus in the Gospel narratives. One of them approaches Jesus, most likely not out of an interest in actual dialogue or even to learn something, and asks a question to which they already know the right answer. The question “Which is the first of all the commandments?” is one that scholars had long debated, because there were so many commandments. Not, of course, just the ten that we are familiar with, but, throughout all of the Hebrew Scriptures, more than six hundred! But the answer that Jesus gives is one that is well-accepted. In fact, it is a part of scripture that Jews memorized and taught their children to memorize. One that boiled it down to what worshiping One God meant:

    Hear, O Israel!
    The Lord our God is Lord alone!
    You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
    with all your soul,
    with all your mind,
    and with all your strength.

    But here’s the point where it really gets interesting: Jesus goes him one better, saying:

    The second is this:
    You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
    There is no other commandment greater than these.

    The scribe hadn’t asked for two greatest commandments, but if he had, he probably would have picked that second one too. These two commandments boiled down all of the teaching of the law and the prophets into a neat, concise package: love of God and love of neighbor. This was foundational to the Jewish way of life, and having been quoted so quickly, without thinking, by Jesus, no one was brave enough to ask him any more questions. The scribe goes away close to the kingdom of God, if he will stop asking questions and start actually living the law and the prophets.

    That challenge is there for us, too, of course. Love of God and love of neighbor, loving the way God has loved us, this is the heart not just of the Old Testament law and the prophets, but also of the Gospel itself. God, who loved us enough to send his only Son, so that we might believe in him and have eternal life, also sent that Son to show us the way. So this Gospel interaction is foundational to our call as disciples. In order to be on course for the kingdom of God, a place we all want to be, we have to love God and love our neighbor. The kingdom of God is not a far-off distant thing or place to be achieved in the afterlife, but is in fact here among us, as Jesus proclaimed all through his time on earth. One gets to that kingdom by love of God and love of neighbor, by living the love that God has so freely given us. That is why living these commandments from our hearts is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. So love of God and love of neighbor, the heart of the Judaeo-Christian life, needs to be the center of everything we think or say or do. Love of God and love of neighbor needs to be the lens through which we see everything.

    So, friends, that means that we have to bring that lens with us to see the way through every interaction of our lives. Not just the ones that are easy and joyful, but also the interactions that are frustrating and painful. We have to love God and neighbor when the guy cuts us off on the highway; when the customer service agent puts us on hold for the fourth or fifth time; when we or a loved one get a frightening diagnosis and we have to navigate the healthcare system; when our coworkers drop the ball and make us look bad; when our children make poor decisions; when we disagree with a spouse or loved one; when a government official makes a terrible decision; and all the rest. Then it’s time, not just to say “okay, whatever, that’s fine” but instead to make decisions and corrections and advocate for the truth and do what is right, but do it all with love and grace, and with trust in God’s love and mercy. I recently saw a meme on social media that said: “You are made in the image of God. So is the idiot you’re arguing with.” That should give us pause to think and to love.

    The Liturgy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, which we will celebrate in just a few weeks, calls on us to work with God to put forward, here on earth, a kingdom of love and peace, a kingdom of justice and truth. You’ll hear that quote in the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer that day. That’s what our life on earth is all about. We truly are not far from the kingdom of God. All we have to do is to love God, love neighbor, and enter in.

  • All Souls Remembrance Mass

    All Souls Remembrance Mass

    On the Sunday closest to All Souls Day (November 2), we offer a remembrance Mass for those who have died during the past year.

    The souls of the just are in the hands of God. His care is with his elect. We shall also be united with him in the resurrection. Death no longer has power over him. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Today’s Liturgy of the Word has good news for those of us who have lost loved ones, whether it be in the past year, or even the more distant past. The passing of time doesn’t take all the sorrow away, we know that, but it does give God a chance to bring us healing and grace and fond memories.

    We have come here today to do just that: to remember our loved ones who have passed away and now have hope of immortality. We pray for their souls and commend them to our loving God that he might, in his great mercy, open the gates of the heavenly kingdom for them and give them the eternal reward for which they have long hoped.

    This morning’s Gospel reading presents us with perhaps the foundational principal of living the Christian life: love of God and love of neighbor. We love God with great fervor because he loved us into existence. And God teaches us how to love: to love him and to love others; in fact we manifest our love of God in very real ways by loving others. Loving others is what brings us here together this morning as we celebrate our annual Mass of Remembrance for those who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith. Our love of them doesn’t end when they leave us; and it is that love that intensifies our grief. And so we gather this morning to remember and to take solace in God’s love for us, knowing that the grave is no obstacle to love, and that death has been defeated by our Savior who loves us more than anything.

    Here at Saint Mary’s, we celebrate a good many funerals every year. So, as your pastor, I’m acutely aware of the grieving of our community. And I can relate to it: in the past few years, I celebrated the funeral of my mother, two of my uncles on my Dad’s side of the family as well as an uncle on Mom’s side; a stark reminder that as I get older, we are losing that previous generation, and I am missing their presence in our lives.

    I want to pause here and speak a little about the reality of grief. Because, if there is one thing that we as a society do extremely poorly, it’s grieving. It seems like we rush through it and hope it’s all done before we have a chance to feel any kind of pain. We want to get this thing done with, check the boxes, and move on. That’s part and parcel of how things work in our world: we have a pill for every malady and a quick remedy for every pain, plagued with a whole host of horrifying side effects. And what’s important to know is that this is not how the Church teaches us to grieve. One of the most important reasons that we have All Souls Day each year is to give us the experience of remembering and grieving and healing. If you truly love, you will truly grieve, and not turn away from it.

    The Church’s Catechism (989) teaches us: “We firmly believe, and hence we hope that, just as Christ is truly risen from the dead and lives for ever, so after death the righteous will live for ever with the risen Christ and he will raise them up on the last day.” And so we Christians never grieve as if we have no hope. The Church’s Liturgy echoes this hope in the third Eucharistic Prayer: “There we hope to enjoy for ever the fullness of your glory, when you will wipe away every tear from our eyes. For seeing you, our God, as you are, we shall be like you for all the ages and praise you without end, through Christ our Lord, through whom you bestow on the world all that is good.” One of the Prefaces to the Eucharistic Prayers for the Dead makes it very clear that this hope touches our experience of grieving: “In him the hope of blessed resurrection has dawned, that those saddened by the certainty of dying might be consoled by the promise of immortality to come (Preface I for the Dead).”

    And so I have some tips on grieving that I hope you will find helpful:

    • First, don’t rush into the funeral. It’s hard to make all those difficult decisions at a moment’s notice. It’s great if you’ve talked about your wishes with your family, because it makes things easier. But if that hasn’t happened, the family would do well to take its time and avail itself of the resources of the funeral director and the church staff so that a funeral that adequately honors the deceased and comforts the living can be prepared.
    • Parents: please talk to your children about your funeral. Yes, that’s going to be a hard conversation. But these days, too many young people are so disconnected from the Church and so averse to any kind of unhappiness, that they really don’t know how to grieve. You have to help them with that.
    • Let other people help you. Even if you can do all the preparations, you don’t have to, and you probably shouldn’t. Let the Church and others help you and minister to you in your time of grief. As a priest, I presided at my father’s funeral, but one of the priests who knew him preached the homily. At both of my parents’ funerals, I availed myself of the presence of a bereavement minister to help me plan the funeral. Did I know how to plan a funeral? Of course. But I found that I needed to be ministered to in my own grieving. On those days, I wasn’t only the priest celebrant, I was also a son grieving the death of his parent, and that was important.
    • Have a wake. A lot of people try to short-cut this one because they think it will be too painful. It will hurt a little, yes, but the comfort of others expressing their love for the deceased and for you will do so much to heal you in the time to come.
    • Don’t be afraid to shed tears. Anyone who has ever seen me preach at some funerals of people I’ve known especially well has seen me get choked up. Or they have seen me shed a tear when I’ve talked about my parents or my grandparents in a homily. Tears heal us, and it’s good for other people, especially your children, to see you cry. They need to know that pain and sorrow are part of life so that they don’t feel like they’ve gone nuts when it happens to them. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by not allowing them to see you grieve.
    • Understand that grief doesn’t just “go away.” Feelings soften with time, yes, but you will grieve your loved ones for many years to come, perhaps your whole life long. I still grieve for my grandparents who have been gone from my life for many, many years now. Sometimes those waves of grief will come up all of a sudden, without warning, kind of out of the blue. And that’s okay. Remember grief is a sign that we have loved, and loving is the most important thing we will ever do.

    Friends, praying for the dead recognizes that all of our lives here on earth are not perfect, and the only way that we can attain the saving grace necessary for life in heaven is by turning to our Savior who gave his life for us. Our second reading today gives us confidence that we can do this, and that his sacrifice on behalf of our loved ones, and of us, is sufficient, because his is a priesthood that never passes away. He offered himself once for all, and that is enough, if we turn to him and ask his mercy.

    In a few moments, I will sing words that have comforted me so many times in my sorrow. They are the words of the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer: “Indeed, for your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended, and when this earthly dwelling turns to dust, an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.” This echoes the words of the Prophet Isaiah who confidently proclaims: “The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces; The reproach of his people he will remove from the whole earth; for the Lord has spoken.”

    During November, the Church continues to remember those we prayed for on the second day of this month, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. For this remembrance, I have chosen to reflect on our experience of grief, and I’ve done that because it’s an experience we all have, on some level, at some time in our lives. I want you to know how very natural grief is, and how very blessed an experience it is. We must always remember that blessed experiences aren’t always pain-free. Our God never flees from our brokenness, instead he has chosen to redeem it. That is why he offered himself on the cross, willingly, for us.

    And so we are confident, because we know that death only separates us from those we love for a short time, and that death never has the last word because Christ has triumphed over death. The beginning and end of everything is Christ, and Christ is with us in our first moments, and also in our last. He is with us in our pain and with us in our joy. He helps us to remember our loved ones with love that continues beyond our death and beyond the grave. Grief and loss and pain, and even the grave, are temporary things for us. Love is eternal, love never ends, love can never be destroyed by death, love leads us all to the great glory of the resurrection and eternal light in that kingdom where Christ has conquered everything, even death itself.

    Therefore, it is with profound sadness, but also with ultimate trust in Almighty God that we commend our loved ones to the Lord, knowing that his mercy is great and that his love will keep us united at the Eucharistic banquet until that day when death is conquered and sadness is banished and we are all caught up in God’s life forever.

    Eternal rest grant unto all of our loved ones, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

  • The Solemnity of All Saints

    The Solemnity of All Saints

    Today’s readings

    I think we all bristle, unfortunately and mistakenly, at the idea of being a saint. Saints are those super-holy folks who are depicted in artwork and glorified in amazing stories. We are just ordinary people who struggle with our holiness, at best. But today, the Church is asking us to think about saints in a broader way. Yes, we include all those “official” saints that have been canonized through the ages. The Church rejoices in the saints because when someone becomes a saint, the Church recognizes that he or she is definitely in heaven, the goal of all our lives. That’s what the process of canonization is all about. And bringing people to heaven is the whole point of the Church. So, from the many saints of every time and place, we know of thousands of people that are certainly in heaven. This illustrates that God’s will is done, doesn’t it?

    But, as I said, I think the Church wants us to think about saints in a broader way. There is the story of a schoolteacher who asked her children what a saint was. One little girl thought about the saints she saw in stained glass windows, and said “Saints are people the light shines through.” Think about that for a minute – that little girl isn’t far from the kingdom of God there. Because all people are called to let the light of Christ shine through them, and saints are those people who have made that the business of their lives.

    Heaven is that great multitude that John the Revelator tells us about in today’s first reading: that multitude “which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” They are wearing, he tells us, white robes, which have been washed in the blood of the lamb. That seems very counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Everyone knows that blood stains like nobody’s business. But he’s speaking poetically here, and recognizes that nothing washes us sinners quite as clean as the saving blood of Jesus Christ.

    And that’s really the only way. Because we’re quite right when we bristle a bit at being called saints. We can’t be saints all on our own. We aren’t good enough, we can’t make up for our sins with any kind of completeness, and there’s basically no way that we can jump high enough to get to heaven. But this feast of All Saints recognizes that we don’t have to. We don’t have to because Christ has saved us through no merit of our own but based solely on God’s love for us. The fact that we can be called saints is a grace, and we dare not bristle so much that we turn away from that grace.

    It may help to know that most, if not all, of the saints struggled with holiness too. Think about Saint Paul himself: he began his career by persecuting Christians and we know that he had a hand in the stoning of Saint Stephen. Or think about Saint Augustine who was an intellectual man who disdained Christianity, until his mother’s prayers caught up with him. Or we might think even more recently of Saint Teresa of Calcutta who experienced a very dark time in her life when she could not even communicate with Jesus. But Jesus was still there and led her to heaven.

    We are all of us on a journey, and we know that our true home is not in this place, however good it may be. We are on a journey to heaven, and that means that we are in the process of becoming saints. That journey consists in following the Way who is Jesus the Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. He has commanded, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” and there is no way to do that except to follow him.

    So, no, of course, not all of us will be canonized. Most of us will go to the Kingdom rather imperfect in many ways, and will have to work that out in the grace of Purgatory. But if we look to those canonized saints for inspiration, perhaps our relationship with the Lord will lead us and our brothers and sisters to that place where all the saints worship around the Throne of the Lamb.

    Today we, the Church militant, honor the Church triumphant: not only the great saints like Mary and Joseph, Patrick and Benedict, Michael and Gabriel, Francis and Dominic, but also those saints that God alone has known. We glory in their triumph that was made possible by them joining themselves to Christ. We take inspiration from their battles and from the faith that helped keep them in Christ when they could have turned away. If God could do that in their lives, he can certainly do that in ours too. Perhaps, if we are willing to accept it, he can fill us with saintly attributes: strength in weakness, compassion in the face of need, witness to faith in times when society lacks direction, and so much more.

    Those virtues are virtues that we think about when we call to mind those official, canonized saints. But they are virtues for which we can and should strive as well. The desire and the grace to attain those virtues comes from God himself, and the reward for receiving that grace and living those virtues is a heavenly relationship with God. What could be better than that?

    This is a lot of work, it may well go unrewarded this side of the Kingdom of God, and it’s not easy to live a saintly life, but Jesus makes a promise today to those who strive to do so: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven!”