NOVEMBER 1st:

ALL SAINTS DAY.
WHAT A GREAT WAY
TO START A GREAT MONTH?

Today we celebrate All Saints. It’s a good feast. It’s like saying at a banquet, “We want to thank Joe and Charlie, Mary and Patricia, Jane and Tom. Better, we want to thank all of you here today and for all that you do for all of us around here - how you have been like so many wonderful people who have gone before us!”

All Saints Day is not a complicated concept.

Sometimes non-Catholics don’t get it with Catholics and Saints – especially with the Blessed Mother Mary. No, we don’t say Mary or the Saints are Gods. No, we don’t worship them. Yes, we pray to them for help when we want to sell our house, or to find lost ear rings, or when we feel like hopeless cases. Yes, there is probably some superstition and tongue in cheek aspects with regards the Catholic practice of honoring and recognizing saints. And we can laugh at ourselves about all this.

And for those who don’t accept that, on November 1st, we let it all hang out and celebrate all saints and all kinds of saints.

We celebrate the Saints we know: Claire and Francis, Augustine and Teresa, St. Vincent de Paul and St. Paul. But we also celebrate our patron saint: if we have been named after one. And we also celebrate the many saints who surround us – living saints – as well as those people who have gone before us who were good people – models, examples, people who cared, people who made sacrifices for us, people who tried to live the Beatitudes.

We pray: "Thank You God for all the wonderful people who have graced our lives – known and unknown – parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbors."

So we don’t think it’s complicated.

All Saints Day is a day of gratitude to start off the month of November, a month of Thanksgiving.

Tomorrow, All Souls' Day, we’ll pray for our dead.

November is a good month for enriching our spiritual life – especially by reflecting on all kinds of people who are saints – saints with a small “s” - as well as Saints with a capital “S”.

Last night I looked up the Saints of November. It's the month of St. Martin de Porres and St. Martin of Tours, St. Charles Borremeo and St. Columban, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini and St. Margaret of Scotland, St. Andrew the Apostle and St. Andrew Avellino, St. Leo the Great and St. Albert the Great, St. Cecilia and St. Gertrude. It also has a Marian feast: The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary on November 21st.

I like Halloween – because kids can dress up in all kinds of outfits and get sugar overloads. I also love it when Catholic churches and schools have kids dress up in Saints’ outfits - and parade through classrooms or down the main aisle of church.

Saints make sanctity real. Saints make the gospel visible. Saints help kids see holiness in a personal visual aide.

I got a call the other day from a lady about St. John Neumann. Her kid was writing a story about him as well as dress up as St. John Neumann for All Saints Day. Great. The tradition continues.

Here at St. John Neumann Church we celebrate a Saint who visited Annapolis at least two times. And he was supposed to be there for the dedication of St. Mary’s Church on January 15, 1860 – but died on January 5th. He had blessed the cornerstone in 1858.

So we’re blessed here at Annapolis that a Saint was in our presence – remembered by this church and symbolized by his statue in the courtyard outside the front doors here – as well as Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos' statue at St. Mary’s in the Marian Gardens.

So All Saints Day has lots of messages.

Conclusion: whatever message hits us – hits us – and I’m sure we all want to be part of that huge crowd we heard about in today's first reading from Revelation (7: 2-4, 9-14). As the old spiritual song goes – made famous by Louis Armstrong, “When the Saints come marching in, I want to be in their number.”