All Saints, All Souls, & the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time
I hope you took home a good haul from trick-or-treating! Now November is here, and finally your neighbor across the street is out there taking down the 15-foot skeleton in his front yard. Good riddance. Creepy.
If you head over to Home Depot this week, the display of Halloween yard decorations will be a distant memory, now boxed up in some remote corner of the store until next year. In it’s place, of course, is a gigantic display of Christmas decorations, which has been slowing overtaking the Halloween section the past couple of weeks anyway, now in its full glory. Trees, wreaths, inflatable Grinches, and red plastic bins to store all of it in during the “off-season.” It seems like it gets earlier and earlier every year. Maybe eventually it will be so early that it will line back up with the appropriate timeline, and they’ll sell us next year’s Christmas decorations around Christmas time this year.
And the crazy thing is, it’s not just Home Depot. By the end of this week it will be everywhere. It’s like the world around us can’t handle being in between holidays. It’s always “What’s next?, What’s next?” [Thanksgiving: “Hey what about me?”]
Well Christmas, hold your horses…err umm…reindeer. For Catholics, November is an important month, and I don’t even mean taking time to be thankful before you watch football and fall asleep from your tryptophan-induced turkey slumber on the couch. November is the month where we kick things off celebrating All Saints Day, and then remember and pray for those who have died with All Souls Day and throughout the month.
First All Saints Day. If you’ve never heard this before, all of us are called to be saints! That doesn’t mean I’ll have St. Brian of Bridgewater Basilica built in my honor someday, but anyone who is in heaven is a saint, just like all those whose jerseys are retired in the spiritual hall of fame. So we need to remember our own call and to say yes to the adventurous life of faith that God is inviting us to. We should also look to the saints who have gone before us as models of living out the Christian life, and also as intercessors who can pray for us along the way. According to French novelist Léon Bloy (so Google’s AI overview tells me since I didn’t remember who said this), “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” And in the readings from this Sunday, we find the key to being a saint is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
So what’s All Souls Day/month about? Well, most of us probably won’t go straight through the pearly gates of heaven when we die, we’ll need a pit stop at the car wash in purgatory, to be purified of any of the residue of our sins, so that we’re ready for that perfect union with God. And this purifying car wash is powered by the prayers of those still on earth. That’s why we pray for the repose of the souls of those who have died, that God would bring our departed loved ones through that process, and then into perfect union with Him in heaven. And hopefully people do the same for us when it’s our turn to go through that purification. Anyone who has rejected God’s mercy entirely at the end of their life gets a one-way ticket to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks, and there’s no praying your way out of that one. CS Lewis wrote that the doors of Hell are locked from the inside, so those who have fully rejected God wouldn’t want to get out of there anyway.
One way many saints throughout the ages have reminded themselves to live with the realities of heaven, hell, and purgatory in mind, is with the phrase “Memento Mori”, reminding them to remember their death. Some monks traditionally would even keep a skull on their desk, which you may have seen in paintings, and that’s precisely what this was for. So it turns out your neighbor across the street had the right idea. Maybe ask him if you can borrow his 15 foot skeleton this month, since he seems to be done with it and is now up on his roof with an inflatable Rudolph. Don’t they make inflatable turkeys?!