All Saints

 A friend ended a recent poem with the lines: “...dreading winter / and in need of balm.” So I asked, “Are you really dreading winter?”, and she replied, “Yes, I am and I do so more each year. I think it’s to do with getting closer to eternal life. We’re not meant for things like winter.”

 Today is one of the traditional dates for the onset of winter. And today, like balm, there comes this feast of All Saints. Today in the Church’s Liturgy, the “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) comes to meet us. Eternal life comes close. John, on the island of Patmos, saw it: “a huge number, impossible to count, from every nation, race, tribe and language; they were standing in front of the throne and of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands” (Rev 7:9). Today, we’re like Abraham, taken outside his tent at night by the Lord, and told, “Look up at the sky and count the stars if you can. Just so will your descendants be” (Gen 15:5). Or like Jacob who, fleeing from an angry brother, headed north, sleeping rough, and in a dream saw a ladder stretching from earth to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending on it (Gen 28:12). Or like Elisha’s servant who wakes up one morning and horror-struck sees the little town of Dothan surrounded by the Syrian army. “Oh, my lord, what are we to do?” “Do not be afraid, replies the prophet, for there are more on our side than on theirs...And the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he saw the mountains covered in fiery horses and chariots surrounding Elisha” (2 Kgs 6: 15,17).
 Stars and angels, horses and chariots, a cloud, a huge number, says the Bible. “Martyrs and Confessors, preached Bl. John Henry Newman, Rulers and Doctors of the Church, devoted Ministers and Religious brethren, kings of the earth and all people, princes and judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old men and children, the first fruits of all ranks, ages and callings, gathered each in his own time into the paradise of God. This is the blessed company which today meets the Christian pilgrim in the Services of the Church” (PPS II, 32). Today, to say it again, Eternal Life comes close.
 There’s no doubt  that God sends saints from heaven into our lives. Mary palpably. But every Christian name brings a saint in its wake. Then there are stories that catch our imagination, biographies we read, shrines we have visited, days when significant things have happened, places we have lived. An Orthodox lady from Eastern Europe, now living here, asked me for a book about Scottish saints. “I always like to know the saints of where I’m living,” she said. Then add the good, and more than good, people we have known, who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. It would be doubting God’s goodness to doubt they are in his presence. “Who can count the dust of Jacob, asked the prophet Balaam? Who can number the cloud of Israel? May I die the death of the just, and may my future be like theirs!” (Num 23:10).
 Today - All Saints - Eternal Life comes close. It stops being a puzzling abstraction. It becomes real. We can see it and touch it. It becomes names, faces, stories, places. If heaven seems vague and elusive, think of people, of saints. “We crowd these all up into one day, says Newman again: we mingle together in the brief remembrance of an hour all the choicest deeds, the holiest lives, the noblest labours, the most precious sufferings, which the sun ever saw” (l.c.). And God, the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three times holy, comes close to us in the saints, and calls to us in them and through them.  Christ comes close. This feast brings his second coming close. It is an advent. The saints are his vanguard, his outriders. Judgment is close. And when we die it will not be simply God, simply Christ, we meet, but the saints, with whom the Lord shares the judgment and whose prayers can raise us to heaven. “May I die the death of the just, and may my future be like theirs!”

 
 Today’s Gospel is the beatitudes. Another landscape opens. It’s holiness’ inner profile. And in the beatitudes eternal life comes close again. In poverty of spirit, gentleness, mourning, hungering and thirsting for uprightness, and so on. In purity of heart. But these aren’t abstractions either. I can’t help seeing another crowd, this time on earth. All those people, who even unknown to themselves, embody the beatitudes; all who are suffering for Christ, today. They exist. There are merciful, peacemaking people. They may have nothing else, but having that, they’ve everything. They’re people to whom, through whom, eternal life comes close. Surely the Holy Spirit will give them a sense of that today.

 “My dear people, we are already the children of God, but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is that when it is revealed we shall be like because we shall see him as he really is. Surely everyone who entertains this hope must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ” (1 Jn 3:3). Yes, today - in the Liturgy, in the Eucharist - the communion of saints, in heaven and on earth, comes close to us. Eternal life comes close. We feel it. We’re not meant for things like winter. Animals, for all the struggles they have, are completely at home in this world. They have their niche and they fill it. There’s an uncomplicated contentment and completeness about them. They fit. We don’t. Or we do and we don’t, but mainly don’t.  We’re misfits. We’re not meant for this world. We’re meant to be dissatisfied and troubled and discontent. We go through the winter of our discontent, and long for eternal life, whether we know it or not. And today, Eternal Life comes close. “Surely everyone who entertains this hope must purify himself, must try to be as pure as Christ.” Pope Benedict in a real way has refreshed our sense of mission, and clarified that the essential mission is holiness. It’s the one thing worth going for, however obliquely we go at it. The passing years bring that home more and more. Here I am, so many years old, not with as many left. Here I am in this place, in this country, another winter coming. Can I aspire to something?
 
 I began with a poet. Let me end with another. “For Scotland I sing, wrote George Mackay Brown, the Knox-ruined nation,/  that poet and saint / must rebuild with their passion” (Prologue). What Scotland, Britain, Europe, the world, the 21st century need, above all, is saints. There is only one sadness, not to be among them. “The Church of the first Christians in its glory awaits us, says St Bernard, and we turn aside; the saints lovingly call us and we make little of it; the host of the redeemed look for us and we are not interested. Brothers, at long last let us shake off our torpor and rise with Christ to seek the things that are above,” the Eternal Life the saints bring so close to us. Amen.

       Fr. Hugh O. S. B