See what love the Father has bestowed on us
Brother and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the world will agree with us when we say, love makes the world go round. Where the world will probably disagree with us is the understanding of the kind of love that makes this movement happen. To them, love will be what the Greeks would call eros, a physical, sexual, desire. For Christians, this love in Greek terms, would be agape the self-sacrificing love that found its truest expression on the Cross of Our Lord; “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15: 13.)
Today, on the Solemnity of All Saints, we celebrate this agapic love, for this is what marks the saints, their self-sacrificing love for God, a love that drove their entire lives and has ensured that they are now in heaven. Following the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbour, they now spend their time in heaven, in the divine presence, ready to respond to those who petition them for their prayers.
The saints are ready to respond to our prayers, for the reason contained in the formula of the Creed: “the communion of saints.” As §948 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us:
the term “communion of saints” …. has two closely linked meanings: communion in holy things (sancta) and among holy persons (sancti).”
Through baptism, we all share in the promises of heaven, and through baptism, we too are made one in nature with the saints who are in heaven. As the first letter of St. John teaches us today:
See what love the Father has
bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
By virtue of this sharing in holy things, therefore, the saints are ever ready to respond to our cries for help, to aid us on the path to heaven. As the Gospel from last Friday taught us:
Who among you, if your son or ox
falls into a cistern,
would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?
Like parents, they respond to our prayers, and offer up prayers of their own, so that we may be pulled out from the cisterns (of sin) that we fall into.
If we are already, in principle, in communion with the saints, it behooves us, to be holy ourselves, because we too are part of God’s holy ones. Listen, again, to the words of St. John in his first letter:
Beloved, we are God's children now
And what does it take to become holy?
In his book The Spiritual Combat – prized by a number of saints – Lorenzo Scupoli (1530-1610) indicates that the genuine spiritual life, i.e. the life of holiness, consists in: firstly, “the knowledge of the goodness and the greatness of God, and of our nothingness and inclination to all evil;” secondly, “the love of him and the hatred of ourselves;” third, “subjection, not to him alone, but, for love of him, to all his creatures;” fourth, “entire renunciation of all will of our own, and absolute resignation to all his divine pleasure;” and finally, “willing and doing all this purely for the glory of God and solely to please him, and because he so wills and merits thus to be loved and served.”
Too often, and principally among us who dare to presume our holiness, we think of ourselves as perfect. The first step on the road to holiness, Scupoli therefore warns us, is to grow in appreciation of our own capacity for wickedness. Having grown in this knowledge, we must reject our very selves, and our own desires, until we can live, not for ourselves, but for others. In this task, that great line from the Lord’s prayers bears repeating, over and over again:
Your will be done.
And then, live our lives, not for our own pleasure, but for the pleasure of God, taking delight in serving Him, and Him alone.
In his presentation of Scupoli’s book, the late Fr. Jonathon Robinson of the Toronto Oratory, points out that “The Spiritual Combat is a work directed toward the practice of the ascetical life.” The ascetical life, he points out, can be said to represent:
All those elements of the spiritual life that involve an organized campaign against the sinful aspects of the self, and against exterior temptation, as well as positive efforts directed towards the perfection of our own spiritual activities.
In this way he points out that asceticism is broader than the external and physical austerities that we take up. Austerity is about the ordered effort to imitation Him, who gave His life on the cross so that we might live. It is also about following in the royal path of the cloud of witnesses, the saints, who imitated Him before us, and even now are at ready to help us if only we call them by name.
Too rarely, however, do we call them by name, my dear brothers and sisters, and if we do, it is for temporary and material benefits. The saints can relied on for greater aid and support and we must hasten to this task.
All God’s holy angels and saints, pray for us!
(A version of this homily was first preached to the Catholic residents at Aaji Care Home for Assisted Living, Old Goa.)
Image reference: The Saints in Procession (detail from The Triumph of the Sacred Heart), Luc-Olivier Merson, 1911 (?), Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, Paris.)
