All Saints 2021

Statues, icons, medals, prayer cards and stained glasses are sacramental reminders of the saints. But they can also act as barriers to thinking about them. What a memento does sometimes is to keep the signified at a safe distance. A good example is the Crucifix. As a symbol, it is an even more powerful reminder. Have you seen movies where a character spotting a Crucifix behave immorally? Actually, we do not need to watch movies to see this. Do we, on the road, with our rosary hanging prominently from our rear-view mirror, curse and swear at other drivers? The hanging rosary, like the Crucifix we wear and the Bible on the shelf have become Catholic ornamentals or decorations and no more.

The point is, all these sacramentals can become mere or empty tokens—empty or devoid of meaning. Symbols are powerful pointers or basically useless relics. Today, we are celebrating the Saints who have gone before us. As a generic Solemnity, it commemorates all the Saints and since none is specifically celebrated, this feast can be “tokenised” into an empty remembrance.

Nevertheless, a day dedicated to “all” the Saints has to be common or general because it expresses a truth of our Credo. I believe in the “Communion of Saints”. The accent is on “Communion”. It refers to no specific saint because the Solemnity is training our sight on the multitude of Saints who composes this sea of holiness—a reality beyond an individual Saint. In the context of social distancing and isolation, this notion of “Communion” should take on a more personal meaning. To know that we are in touch with those who have gone before us marked by the sign of faith can be deeply consoling and it can grant respite from our isolation, loss and disconnexion.

On one level, this “Communion” is a reminder that great help is available to us if only we turn to the Saints. As St Therese of Lisieux gave the assurance that she would spend her heaven doing good on earth, we should have recourse to the saints at all times. They are waiting to render assistance. However, more than their utilitarian function of helping us, they beckon us as models of faith and action. Imitation belongs to the art of mimicry—we copy and echo them. Since many of them have such colourful lives, they give us hope that we too can be redeemed and saved.

Linked to this hope is the Catholic practice of retaining saintly relics. It might not be as ghoulish as we think. Ironically though, we are fascinated with the macabre and yet at the same time repulsed by it. We want movies to be gorier and bloodier. Think Michael Bay—big-budget and high-octane action. Yet, we recoil at the Catholic practice of preserving parts of a Saint. Take the case of St Jean-Marie Vianney. On the occasion of his failing an examination, he heard a disparaging remark from the tester. “Brother John-Baptist, you are a complete ass!”. He replied with a wisdom which only the innocent can give, “Monsignor, if God could bring victory to Samson with just the jawbone of an ass, imagine what He will achieve with a whole donkey!”. Every piece of relic of a Saint that we have the chance to venerate, gives us hope and encouragement. If Christ can do remarkable things with this Saint, He can work on us too.

Today it is hard to sell the Saints. We have kept them at a distance. Hardly do our children know of the Saints except in a functional manner—like St Anthony of Padua or St Pius of Pietrelcina. They may know recent ones but not many youths can recount the lives of the more venerable Saints. We have kept them at a distance because it is getting even harder to sell heaven. Initially, we could, as in Confession, think in terms of “fear of hell and the loss of heaven”. Given the comforts of luxury, heaven is quite far from our minds. More so when our idea of heaven is staring “boringly” at God. We should ask if heaven is as far as we have distanced it? If we are honest, the many addictions we have are really indications of this heaven-hunger we have not attended to.If you have been regularly attending Masses, we frequently highlight the lives the saints. Why? Firstly, All Saints’ Day runs the risk of being an empty celebration if we conveniently ignore the Church sanctoral cycle. Secondly, there is a matter coming from our understanding that a Sacrament is an “outward sign of inward grace”. If the “Communion of Saints” is generic, then every Saint is a lived example of the “Communion” that exists amongst all the baptised—living or dead. Thus, an individual saint is a sacramental—an “outward sign of the inward grace” of “Communion” that we are commemorating today. Saints are not dead, like the decorations removed from the shelf and dusted off once in a while. Instead, every Saint on earth was a living Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. Now in heaven, they give us concrete proof of how we can, with the grace of God, join them in