Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This Sunday we celebrate the great feast of All Saints. How do you imagine saints to be? In our catholic tradition we see lots of images of saints. We have statues of Our Blessed Mother, St Joseph, St Urban, and St Anthony of Padua in our churches. Many Catholic families have images and statues in their homes. In my childhood home, other than family pictures, virtually all of of our images were pictures of Jesus, Mary and other saints. After the death of my parents I kept many of them. In the presbytery I still have my family’s image of the Sacred Heart dedication when I was a two year old. In my missal I still have images of the saints going back to my childhood, all of them looking holy and often floating on a cloud in heaven. So how do you imagine saints to be? Who are your favourites and why? Why do we have saints, and why do we have a day in the year when we celebrate them?

For me the first thing to bear in mind is that the saints did not have a "pearly heavenly life" on earth. They were all people like us, with our strengths and weaknesses. Not all of them were easy people to be with; St Jerome living in his cave was seen as being a very difficult even unbearable man. Some of them had, to put it mildly, chequered histories. As a nurse one of my favourite Saints was, and is, St Camillus de Lellis. Camillus was a soldier, drinker and a gambler. Not the most promising material, but he went on to found a religious order dedicated to care of the sick. For that matter the apostles were a pretty unpromising bunch, Peter had no special training in religion and Matthew was a tax collector, people who were notorious for collaborating with the occupying power, theft, and extortion. People at the time must have wondered why on earth Jesus chose them as his closest associates. Therese of Lieseux herself observed that she could have either been a great sinner or a great saint. So saints were and are people like us. 

So what made the difference? All of the saints, as we do just by being Christians, opted for something greater than themselves. Of their own free will, and despite their weaknesses, they opted for belief in God and in salvation through Christ. For many it meant giving up their old ways, drinking, gambling, theft, debauchery, even violence. For many others the conversion was less radical, more quiet. But all of them sensed, though the guidance of the Holy Spirit, something greater than themselves. Something that changed their lives for good. Changed their lives for eternity. They decided to live out in their lives being a child of God knowing that they had to change, also knowing that the world would not understand, that it would reject many of them and for many of them cost them their lives. 

Jesus tells us how to be a child of God in Sunday’s gospel in the beatitudes. A manifesto that if we follow it will transform our lives and the world around us. It is a manifesto so powerful that it also has meaning for people with no religion at all. The beatitudes are the guide on how to become a saint. It is not something that is risk free; people will not understand us and the choices we make. Some will speak badly of us and persecute us in different ways, but the reward is eternal union with God, eternal light, happiness and peace. We can see this in the saints.

The saints show us the way. The saints show us how sainthood, if we persevere, is the destiny for all of us. We must not be discouraged, after all, Oscar Wilde commented that every saint has a past and that every sinner has a future. 

We are one people with the community of saints; we acknowledge this every time we say the creed. If you are in difficulty look up a saint who had had that difficulty too (there will be one or more), the saints are our friends, ask them for their help. Which saint’s name do you have? You can ask them for help too. I suspect that there are many saints just waiting to be asked, they are a group so large that they cannot be counted and thank God for that.

Please accept an assurance of my daily prayers for your needs and intentions. 

God bless and keep you always.

Fr Chris