Homily

An old country priest, a dear friend of mine, on the feast of All Saints, in order to make his parishioners understand the importance of that remembrance, removed the images and statues of the saints from the altars. He said that on that day, all holy Christians who are in paradise should be remembered, those whose faces and names we do not know; obviously, the Lord knows them well, and sees them and has them close to him. And the priest added that it was great wisdom to celebrate this feast of the saints-without-a-name. There is, in fact, a risk when we put saints on the altar; a risk which arises not from them, but from our laziness and from a foolish shrewdness. And he —this is still the priest speaking— would reason thus with his flock: "Once we have placed the saints on the altar, we have emptied them, because we no longer feel that they are within our capacity; we make them saints in order to imitate them, but once they have been raised to the altars, there immediately springs up a sense of distance in comparison to them: we admire and venerate them, we pray to them (a quite appropriate thing to do!), but they are too heroic to be imitated; our poverty and smallness —which we claim, moreover, only in these cases— does not permit us to rise to their level." It is perhaps a simple way to reason, but it is not lacking in wisdom.
The Church, truly mother and teacher, who works in every way to press her children onto holiness, comes to us today and presents us with the great crowds of common saints. We can say that the saints which we remember today are the multitude of those who, like the publican, have admitted their sin, have renounced making excuses and claiming privileges, and have entrusted themselves to the mercy of God (cf. Lk 18:10-14). They are not heroes, quasi-supermen of the spiritual life, admirable but impossible to imitate. They are common men and women, a multitude made up of disciples of all periods who have tried to hear the gospel, and made up also of unbelievers, persons of goodwill who have made a commitment to live not just for themselves.
The Book of Revelation, which we heard in the first reading, reveals to John an incredible scene: "There was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands"(7:9). No one, no matter what people or culture he or she belongs to, provided he or she is willing, is excluded from participating in the life of the saints. That multitude is made up of all the "children of God:" it is the family of the saints. These are not "important" and brave persons, but rather those called by God to be part of his people. "You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (l Cor 6:11). It is a people made up of the weak, of the ill, of the needy; of people who are before God not standing up, but on their knees; not with head held high, but bowed down; not with a demanding attitude, but with hands outstretched begging for help.
One is a saint, then, not after death, but now already, from the time we come to be part of the familia Dei (trans: family of God), from the moment we are "separated" (this is the meaning of "holy") from the sad destiny of this world. John, in his first letter, says it clearly: "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are... Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed" (1 Jn 3:1.2). Holiness is (should be) what every believer’s life should be committed to; the horizon in which to inscribe the thoughts, actions, choices, projects, be they personal or collective. Holiness is not a wholly-internal reality distanced from the concreteness of human vicissitude, just as one’s own life as a child of God who belongs to his family is not parenthetical to one’s own life.
It is a matter, rather, of a dimension which revolutionizes each person’s life. In gospel terms, holiness is as described in the Beatitudes (cf. Mt 5:1-12), acutely defined by someone the "constitution" of the person of the second Millennium. They can help human beings to leave behind the sad condition in which they find themselves. The gospel conception of happiness, which is the reverse of that of the dominant culture, is in fact a precious guide. It is true that we can ask ourselves: How can one be happy when one is poor, afflicted, meek, merciful? And yet, when we look more closely at the causes of bitterness in life, we perceive them to lie in insatiableness, in arrogance, in prevarication, in peoples’ indifference. The holy way of life is not, then, an extraordinary one; it is rather the daily way of men and women who seek to live in the light of the gospel.