Solemnity of All Saints

We all have our objectives or goals in life. For a few it may be to run a company, or win an election, or get to the Olympics. For most of us it’s something more limited: to support our family, to pass an exam, to deal with an illness. At the most basic level, in common with all living creatures, the goal is to survive - that’s built into our genes, into our cells.

But what about our spiritual life? What goals do we have there? To be holy - to be saints? Isn’t being a saint the ultimate achievement of the Christian life? And we’re told we’re all saints, or can be, so this isn’t like winning the Olympics, or even becoming Pope - it’s a perfectly reasonable objective we all can and should aspire to.

Or is it?

When Jesus calls out ‘the blessed’ (Matthew 5:1-12a) he isn’t identifying those who have achieved some objective, like handing out prizes in a competition. We don’t set out to be poor in spirit, or to mourn. We don’t usually even set out to be merciful or to be peacemakers. Those are things that sit alongside our activities - we find ourselves exercising mercy or making peace as circumstances arise, just as we mourn because that’s the situation we find ourselves in. We might decide to go on a march for peace, and that could be a worthy cause, but it’s not the same as trying to reconcile an argument that has just blown up between friends.

Our spiritual life is not something extra or alongside our “normal” life, it doesn’t give rise to additional goals or objectives. As John’s letter tells us, we are children of God (1 John 3:1-3) - that’s been given to us, it’s part of what we are, just like our eyes and our hair and our hearts. We live our lives, and we mourn and make peace and strive for justice as part of that living, not as some extra set of activities we are called to do.

As John also notes, we don’t know what that leads to. We do know that the struggle for survival in this world, in this life, will end. Whatever we may have achieved will be left behind, as Jesus so forcefully noted. But we also know that Jesus conquered death, that our relationship with God is not limited to this world. With all his other children, with all the saints, we are part of that countless multitude proclaiming “Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever”. (Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14)