The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Celebrating the Saints
On Nov. 1st, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, a devotion that takes us back many centuries. All Saints became a universal in the 9th century, but its origins trace back to the beginnings of Christian faith, to the days of the first martyrs and the Roman persecutions.
Devotions to the saints began with the honor paid to those early victims, their tombs quickly becoming sites of pilgrimage, the martyred rightly given veneration as the holiest of the faithful. The meaning of “Martyr,” is “Witness,” and the first saints to be honored gave the greatest possible witness: the loss of their own lives because of their faith in Jesus.
Later, especially after Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, that understanding of witness began to broaden. Now, the possibility of red martyrdom was greatly diminished, but the way of white martyrdom began to emerge. That new way of witness and martyrdom owed itself to the first monks in the deserts of Egypt. With the grace of red martyrdom effectively denied them, these men and women instead chose a life in which they gave up everything: marriage, possessions, and status, to flee into the deserts of Egypt to pursue a life of seeking God in prayer, doing penance, and living in austerity.
Taken together, these two ways of martyrdom, Red and White, both lived u tina great commitment to faith in Christ has led to saint after saint. Many of them have their own feast days and observances; but the Feast of all Saints, puts a special emphasis on the ones who are unknown to us, the members of the Great Multitude revealed in the Book of Revelation, as those “which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” all standing before the throne in robes made white by “the blood of the Lamb.”
Every one of them, as Pope Gregory IX once said, “is a light on a lampstand.” Receiving the light of Jesus, they become light themselves. This true even of the ones we know nothing about. We know they exist. We know they are numerous, and they remind us in their very anonymity that holiness is not necessarily expressed in “extraordinary charisms” or miraculous graces or monumental acts. These saints lived out their salvation in small acts of grace and love, whose perseverance in the way of the cross might have gone unnoticed or seemed insignificant even to other holy people in the day, but they were noticed and even greatly valued by the Lord.
Anyone reading this who is familiar with St. Therese of Lisieux what recognizing in all this something of her “Little Way.” Indeed, the unknow saints in the Great Multitude point to it, and these saints are very helpful in reminding us that sainthood is doable. These saints lived lives much like our own. Our task is often the simple one set in front of us by a God who knows we can do it, and that is encouraging. As Pope Benedict XVI once said, reflecting on the graces given to saints, with God “the impossible becomes possible and even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.” These saints remind us that a holy life begins fundamentally by listening, by hearing God’s call and following him, in the truth that he desires the acts of love but not necessarily things to be written down in history books or commemorated with monuments.4
This brings us to why we honor the saints. Undoubtedly, living in the glory of God, saints need nothing from us. However, honoring saints builds us up. The saints are models for us on how to live and act and a saint reveals the qualities of Jesus himself, whom we are called to imitate. Each saint is God’s own work, and that work created countless persons of enormous love constantly interceding on our behalf, work deserves its own homage.5
We’ll celebrate All Saints called to the same holiness as all of them, called to walk the same path of doing God’s will in faith, hope, and love.6 If there is anything we could do to prepare for the Mass of All Saints—and All Saints is a Holy Day of Obligation—it’s to rekindle within us the urge to be like them and to be holy ourselves. If there’s anything the saints enjoy that we do not as yet, it’s that the glory of God shines forth constantly in them. Our hope and request of Jesus in the Eucharist is that he grant to us the grace to let him shine through, that we might be the shining lamp on a lampstand. Instead, our hope is that his light shines forth in us as it does in all the saints, and not simply for a day on November 1st here on earth, among a Great Multitude for all eternity.
All Saints and All Souls, Mark Hargreaves, O.S.B.*, *Monk of Prinkash Abbey, Gloucester, England, Taken from: L’Osservatore Romano Weekly Edition in English, 2 November 2011, pg. 44, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/all-saints-and-all-souls-5174
New American bible, Rev. 7:13-14; https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/celebrating-the-solemnity-of-all-saints-2006-6120, Celebrating the Solemnity of All Saints 2006, Pope Benedict XVI, The Saints: our friends and models of life
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/bull-of-canonization-of-st-francis-of-assisimira-circa-nos-7860
4 Pope Benedict: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/on-the-translation-of-pro-multis-in-the-eucharistic-prayer-6885)
5 Pope Benedict: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/on-the-translation-of-pro-multis-in-the-eucharistic-prayer-6885); Alban Butler https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/all-saints-5172
6 https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/celebrating-the-solemnity-of-all-saints-2006-6120
Celebrating the Solemnity of All Saints 2006, Pope Benedict XVI