What it means to look past the saintly.
Episode 3 of the Make Saints podcast: “All (Saints)”
the episode script
November 1st is All Saints’ Day. The day we honor the saints of the church.
November 2nd is All Souls’ Day. The day we honor everybody else.
For many churches, the focus is on All Saints’ Day. And we tend to just sort of…throw it all together into one big pot and hope the stew turns out.
There are the official saints and then there are those people in our lives we think are saintly, so we throw them in there. And yeah, maybe your Dad was kind of a pain in the butt, but you know, you also don’t really want to imagine he’s in the bad place, so you may as well toss him in, too.
This is what I’ve experienced in the church myself around this particular holy day. People want to remember the people they have loved living among the saints in heaven.
Which is kind of an interesting remix of the two days together if we think about it.
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Some parts of the church have rebranded All Souls’ Day as All the Faithful Departed, which sounds pretty regal and dignified, doesn’t it? And let’s be honest, a lot less bleak than “All Souls’.”
But there’s a move there that we should notice: it shrinks the pool of candidates. It changes the mix and the purpose to lift up those loved ones while boxing out others.
All the faithful departed implies only the faithful who have died. So yes, your blessed grandparents and your Dad and, yes, even that no good, deadbeat cousin. He got dunked for Jesus, so he’s good to get in. But the billions of others? Suddenly we’ve stopped being interested.
So those grieving the loss of family and friends this year, they can really step into this All Saints’ deal with gusto knowing that these faithful departed are indeed among the saints.
Which…again…is not quite it.
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What is the word that All Saints and All Souls have in common? All. I know, crazy.
The point is that these are different days in which we hallow our saints—honor them as holy—and then the next day, we turn all of our attention to honoring all souls. Not just the people we love. Or like. Or tolerate some of the time. All of them.
We do these separate so that we can take time to honor our saints. And no, we don’t have to be canon lawyers about it, but if we only talk about fishing trips with Uncle Steve, it is hard to see the multitude of voices who have displayed the love of God to the world.
And if we don’t get the time to pray for the whole world and all of creation, we are bound to place ourselves: our needs, values, and commitments: above our neighbors.
And worse, we’re bound to see our dead neighbors as collateral damage to our supreme cause.
We already have a problem with only counting our country’s own casualties in war. Now add to that all of the coups, global supply chains, economic coercion, and the multitudinous ways we other our neighbors and call them less than us.
We don’t need yet another day to remember the people we always remember. We do need reminding that all souls are worthy.
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If we can’t keep these celebrations separate, then we must strive to recognize what we’re trying to name with pairing these ideas together.
Yes, your favorite people can be numbered among the saints. Yes, that is great and true and I hope you find peace in this.
But let us focus less on the saint and more on the all.