Dear Friends,
Today we join with the whole Church as we celebrate the festival of All Saints. The saints are that great company of people of every age, who have chosen, and lived in, and enjoyed, the happiness of the blessing of God, and who continue to do so. Because they have let the spirit of Christ be alive in them, they have shown us glimpses of what God is like. Some of them are known by name to us, but most are not. These are the ones who have lived quiet faithful lives in their own places and times.
Within this season of remembering the saints, we remember all the faithful departed. We do that particularly tomorrow, All Souls’ Day, at the two Masses that will be celebrated at S. Michael’s. We know that those with whom we have shared our lives, who gave to us as we to them, and who have now died, are not remote from us. We can still share bread with them in Christ and his Eucharist, as we once shared bread with them in our daily lives.
The Bible talks of all who are brothers and sisters in Christ, as saints. It assumes that those who are close to Jesus, who seek to walk in his way, will be so full of his life that it will be contagious.
“Because I am alive, you shall live also,” Jesus says. This contagious aliveness is more true of Jesus of Nazareth, than of any other human being. ‘In him was life, and that life was the light of all people,’ John’s Gospel tells us. And so do all those stories in the Gospels, of people healed and brought back to life in so many ways. Jesus was essentially alive, in the very depth alive: alive to God, alive to the world and alive to every human being in his inwardness. He was so alive, that it is from him that we take our life. (Bishop John Taylor) “Because I am alive, you shall live also,” Jesus says. He says this as we open our hearts to hear his words, and as we open our hands and mouths to receive the sacrament, and as we open our lives to receive others in love. Jesus uses the bread and wine, as he uses our bodies and our blood too, to touch us and others, so that we all may receive the life from him, and make it our own, and overflow with it to others, in ways that we alone can do.
His life in us and our lives in him, that is what makes saints, the friends of God. Blessed be God in his saints. May they continue to bring God’s life to all the world.
May God bless you all.
Fr Peter Williams
