On All Saints Day in 2021 I watched the homily Fr. Mike Schmitz gave at his online Mass, and it has stuck with me since then.
He said, “The Feast of All Saints can be your feast day.”
I think this simple sentence captures the importance of our celebration of all saints day in such a profound way.
Growing up Catholic, I remember dressing up for all saints day in elementary school, and getting a day off from K-8th grade. I remember going to Mass to celebrate and I never really questioned why we did it, I knew it was a holy day of obligation, but I never really understood the significance of the feast day as it related to me until I was in college. But, hearing Fr. Mike’s homily, I was challenged to think about the importance of this feast in regards to my own life.
Why was it a Holy Day of Obligation? Why did we go to Mass to celebrate this feast day? What makes it SO important?
The feast of All Saints honors those who have gone before us. It recognizes them for their perseverance in life and for the way they have shown us the path to heaven. It honors them for a life lived in the grace of God and for their participation in the victory of Christ.
But even more than that, it honors them as a sign of hope for our own salvation. Their example gives us hope that we will also win the race. That our lives will glorify God as theirs have. That we too, can be saints. And not only can we be saints, but we should be saints.
I've struggled a lot with the idea of being a saint throughout my life. One semester in college I took a class all about saints. In every class we would learn about more than one saint who had lived extraordinarily, and I remember thinking that I could never live up to that. That there was no hope for me. I couldn’t be that good or that extraordinary. I was just me.
During one of my assignments for this class, I was reflecting on my perspective on sainthood. I had known that we were supposed to learn from the saints, of course, but it seemed that I had missed the point of what I was really supposed to be taking from their lives.
Caught up in my own imperfection and sinfulness, I let myself lose hope of being a saint. Instead of truly learning how these saints “made it,” instead of seeing how they really got to heaven, I saw an impossible mountain that I could never climb on my own.
That isn’t the point though. The point isn’t to reach some unattainable status of perfection. The point is to learn to rely on the Lord’s grace. To lean on Him in my imperfection and say “Lord, I cannot do this on my own, please carry me where I am too weak to continue any further.” To be like St. Thérèse and ask for an elevator to heaven. To humbly recognize my imperfection and gratefully accept the Lord’s mercy and continue on with Him despite it. And He would ultimately be the one to give the strength to overcome it.
Sainthood isn’t a “fake it til you make it” thing, which is so hard to grasp in our modern society. Sainthood is about accepting the reality of who you are in the eyes of the Lord, and letting Him pull you up where you don’t have the strength. The saints are not the ones who have earned heaven. They’re the ones who have chosen to accept the Lord’s love for them.
This doesn’t mean that we have an excuse to not take our faith seriously. In fact, it means the opposite. We have a God who is constantly reaching out to us. A God who desires to know and love us. He reaches out to us in countless ways: through scripture, through the people around us, through creation, and through the sacraments. He gives us so many opportunities to receive his grace and to respond to His love for us. The saints are the ones who have seen and accepted that. The ones who have learned to lean on the Lord instead of the world.
They were not perfect. They still sinned, they struggled with sins that you and I probably struggle with today. They were no different than you and me. All they did was turn to the Lord and lean on Him in their weakness and do their best to follow Him. And that’s what we’re called to do. And as we put Him first, as we grow in relationship with Him, the rest follows.
Sainthood is not unattainable. It’s not earned by living life perfectly. It’s given to those who seek the Lord above all other things, despite their weakness.
All Saints Day can be your feast day.
You CAN be a saint.
Just lean on the Christ and He will get you there.
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