In celebrating the feast of All Saints’ Day, we are given a most challenging opportunity: to see ourselves differently.
As principal feasts of the church go, All Saints’ Day is solid. We have good music, a relatively relatable concept, and many of our churches are familiar enough with the practices around it.
How we approach the day, however, is probably dependent on how much we focus on the day itself or on the readings.
As someone who usually focuses on the readings, I usually don’t need to sweat the details of the day. This one, however, is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because most of us are trying to do All Saints’ and All Souls’ at the same time.
There are so many ways to approach All Saints’ Day, but a straightforward connection between how we tend to treat sainthood in North America with how Jesus preaches about blessing in the Sermon on the Plain is probably the most useful.
A lot of people are running around with the idea that they need to be better than they are, be a “good person”, and sainthood is an impossible goal. And along comes Jesus who leaves me thinking it’s the opposite. That maybe sainthood is actually something for everyone.