Psallam​​ TIBI​

VOCAMUS SUNT SANCTIS

 

 

WE ARE ALL CALLED TO BE SAINTS: and today’s solemn feast is a celebration of our life in faith and of our destiny. For God did not choose a superhuman race to be His sons through Jesus Christ, but fallen man, whom He has loved since He first breathed life into him. The solemnity of All Saints reminds us of who we truly are in the context of the one Body of Christ, His Holy Church here on earth, in the realm of purification, and in the glory of His Kingdom, where our prayers, with all the saints’, will rise from golden bowls of incense upon the golden altar that is before the throne of God (Rev. 5:8, 8:3).

 

Think then not upon who you are amidst the many failings that mark our daily sojourn, but upon who Christ has made you become. For of our own efforts we are only ever dust that has been shaped into the form of man, but with Christ, the dust to which we return upon death is the beginning of a glorious life with Him who takes this mortal flesh of ours with all its scars and weeping wounds and heals it with the balm of His Spirit, and anoints it with the chrism of His love to make that which by nature is base, worthy to participate in the life of love that is God.

 

So while you weep for your sins, rejoice, for it is you that the good Lord came to call. While you pray for the holy souls in purgatory, be of great comfort, for the vision of God’s glory will be theirs and yours. And while you meditate upon the lives of all the saints that we remember on this day, be inspired, for they were you and I. They are mortal flesh glorified in Christ, and sinners made whole by the outpouring of His mercy. For all who participate in the death and resurrection of Christ are called to be saints, though none are worthy.

 

Know yourself, beloved son and daughter of the Most High. Live as the beloved of God. Live as the redeemed in Christ. Live in the shadow of His wings and you shall be guarded as the apple of His eye. For “blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him in love” (Eph. 1:3-4).

 

This is what sets the saints apart: knowledge of God’s love. Not the mere knowledge of the mind that calculates the least that can be done to be saved, but the knowledge of the heart that sets the soul on fire with pure desire: a desire to be loved and to love in such infinite measure that all our worldly desires become ordered to the divine and we, transfigured by His love, become one body, one spirit in Christ.

 

For it is the great truth of our faith, that none of us is ever alone, for the Body of Christ into which we have been incorporated by His blood is one humanity made one holy priesthood glorified as one sainthood in the love that knows no bounds and lifts each and all into the sublime love that is God.