All Saints Day
This Sunday, on All Saints’ Day, we honour all the saints of the Church. Some friends tell me my devotion to the saints is unfashionable, pointing to the bureaucracy and politicking of the official canonisation process or dismissing saints as saccharinely pious.
Perhaps it’s my convert’s zeal, but for me reading their works and about their lives reveals something far different. They are radical, courageous, and profoundly strange (I say this with love and great admiration).
We live at a time where it can be easy to get dragged down by the negative, even the fear of the end of times: war, climate crisis, AI. Scripture and the lives of the saints show this is nothing new, it’s just a case of the details changing.
Those of us involved in social and climate justice strive to be peacemakers, but to achieve this we can often fall into being too nice or despairing at how few people ‘get it’. How, then, can we be truly Christian peacemakers? We turn to the seemingly contradictory words of the Gospels:
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you." (John 14:27).
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34).
Perhaps to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. To reform a religious order, St Teresa of Ávila risked heresy allegations; to speak truth to power, St Oscar Romero faced death. True peace demands costly courage.
The saints are here to aid us today. I invite you to join me in befriending and emulating them. Perhaps we can make devotion to the saints cool again.
Perhaps it’s my convert’s zeal, but for me reading their works and about their lives reveals something far different. They are radical, courageous, and profoundly strange (I say this with love and great admiration).
We live at a time where it can be easy to get dragged down by the negative, even the fear of the end of times: war, climate crisis, AI. Scripture and the lives of the saints show this is nothing new, it’s just a case of the details changing.
Those of us involved in social and climate justice strive to be peacemakers, but to achieve this we can often fall into being too nice or despairing at how few people ‘get it’. How, then, can we be truly Christian peacemakers? We turn to the seemingly contradictory words of the Gospels:
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you." (John 14:27).
"I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34).
Perhaps to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. To reform a religious order, St Teresa of Ávila risked heresy allegations; to speak truth to power, St Oscar Romero faced death. True peace demands costly courage.
The saints are here to aid us today. I invite you to join me in befriending and emulating them. Perhaps we can make devotion to the saints cool again.
31-35, F