A Homily for the Solemnity of All Saints
Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14 1 John 3:1-3 Matthew 5:1-12a

My mother was a funny woman. She could laugh at herself; she could laugh at death; she could even laugh at the thought of her own death.

Once, when I was consoling her upon the loss of a dear friend, she replied: “Yes, all my friends are dying. Just yesterday, I said to Irene, at this rate there won’t be anyone left to attend our funerals. But that’s alright, Irene. You can go first, and I’ll come to your funeral. I don’t mind waiting.”

“Mom! Nice talk for the mother of a priest. Surely, you’re not afraid of dying.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Evelyn and I were talking about that quite a while ago. We weren’t so sure what would happen after death, and we decided that whoever went first would call the other on the phone and let her know what to expect.”

“So?”

“So, poor old Evelyn’s been dead two years, and I haven’t gotten a phone call!”

“It doesn’t work that way, Mom.”

“That’s what you say. That’s what Evelyn said, but I told her we could give it a try.”

Shakespeare would have understood my mom’s reluctance to embrace eternity. His Hamlet calls death “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveler returns,” adding that it “puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of” (“Hamlet,” III.I.87-90).

But the land of the living must be separated from the domain of the dead if each is to have its own autonomy, its freedom. 

We presume that we are the living ones, and that those who have departed are dead. Our faith insists that the opposite is true. One glance at eternity would tell us that the saints live ever so fully in Christ and that we are the ones who “dwell in the shadow of death” (Ps 23:4).

Why? We were created to dwell with God, to come into union with God. Eternity is our word for our complete sharing in God’s own life. After death, God remains God, and we remain ourselves. But God sanctifies us, lifts us by adoption into God’s own life, which is the fullness of unity, truth, goodness and beauty. 

The saints lack nothing, and the only thing that keeps them from telling us so is the need to maintain our freedom to choose. If heaven hung low, open to view, who would not choose it? But then there would be no free choice on our part, no response from us to the love revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. 

Like their Lord, the saints who have died will not close off our freedom to choose, which they would do if they regularly appeared to us. But that does not mean that they do not know, love and intercede for us in the Lord. 

Here is “Lumen Gentium,” the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, affirming our belief in what we call the “communion of saints.”

Until the Lord shall come in His majesty, and all the angels with Him and death being destroyed, all things are subject to Him, some of His disciples are exiles on earth, some having died are purified, and others are in glory beholding “clearly God Himself triune and one, as He is”: but all in various ways and degrees are in communion in the same charity of God and neighbor and all sing the same hymn of glory to our God. For all who are in Christ, having His Spirit, form one Church and cleave together in Him. Therefore the union of the wayfarers with the brethren who have gone to sleep in the peace of Christ is not in the least weakened or interrupted, but on the contrary, according to the perpetual faith of the Church, is strengthened by communication of spiritual goods. For by reason of the fact that those in heaven are more closely united with Christ, they establish the whole Church more firmly in holiness, lend nobility to the worship which the Church offers to God here on earth and in many ways contribute to its greater edification. For after they have been received into their heavenly home and are present to the Lord, through Him and with Him and in Him they do not cease to intercede with the Father for us, showing forth the merits which they won on earth through the one Mediator between God and man, serving God in all things and filling up in their flesh those things which are lacking of the sufferings of Christ for His Body which is the Church. Thus by their brotherly interest our weakness is greatly strengthened (No. 49).

Some suggest that prayer to the saints is necromancy, which is condemned in Scripture. But necromancy is a search for occult knowledge. It is an exploitation of the dead.

Nor does prayer to the dead challenge Christ’s role as God’s intermediary. We must remember that there is only one will in heaven, that of God the Father. Even the Son and the Holy Spirit, although each has a will proper to himself, orient themselves to the Father’s will. The same is true of all the saints. We do not expect the Virgin Mother or St. Joseph to talk God the Father out of his will on our behalf. Freedom for the saints in heaven is not arbitrary. No, it is alignment with its source, God himself. 

It is no more of a challenge to think of the saints praying for us than it is to understand how any prayer, on earth or in heaven, interacts with the will of God, which is always sovereign. Yet the Gospel tells us to pray for what we need.

And those who insist that we should have nothing to do with those who have died themselves confess a most unscriptural belief. They insist that the deceased sleep unconsciously until the final resurrection of the dead. But this notion only entered Christianity at the time of the Reformation, which sought to curb abuses in prayers for the dead with a completely novel conception in which the saints are dormant in the afterlife until the general resurrection. 

When the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church spoke of the saints at rest, they meant that they no longer struggled to come to completion as we do. It had been granted to them. They certainly did not think that the life of heaven was delayed until the end of history.

Mom offered to call me, but I told her that would not be necessary. I pray to her all the time when what I need seems to correspond to who she was. Like all the saints, she is one more face of my Christ. And though she leaves me my proper space, I know that I enjoy her presence, especially when I laugh at myself. 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.