All you saints of the Lord, pray for us.
Saints, man’s pinnacle of love.
Saints, humanity’s love letters to God.
Saints, lights in our darkness, illuminating through endless years the way to God, the steep, narrow road to Christ.
Saints, anchors in our endless storms, beacons in our turbulent sea of life.
What joy November brings to us with the feast of All Saints — the souls who have reached heaven and now dwell within the creative, blinding light of the beatific vision.
Hidden saints. Humble saints, canonized and uncanonized. Saints for each one of us. Saints for every state, every walk in life. One with us in faith, one with us in the communion of saints, in the Mystical Body of Christ.
How we in this century need them! We the lonely ones, the lost ones, the forgotten ones. The brilliant and the unbrilliant, the leaders of nations and the servants of humble masters. We who are burdened with fears, who walk between two worlds — one dying, one yet unborn; who are deafened by the voices of hell that serve up lies in an endless babble.
We need the saints to lead us into the quiet, forgotten regions of our own hearts where God dwells. We need them to teach us the serenity and peace that come from looking at the face of God in the silence of our hearts. We need them to give us the courage to keep on loving in the midst of hate, to keep on speaking and living the truth in a world of lies, and to continue ceaselessly to “love God back” by loving our neighbor.
Today we need saints to show us the immensity of small, humdrum tasks done over and over for love’s sake, to share with us a trust that knows no doubt, an abandonment to God’s holy will that knows no hesitation, a faith that is a stranger to the smallest doubt, an obedience that folds the wings of judgment and intellect and surrenders, in a passionate detachment from all created goods, so that we might attach ourselves with an undivided heart to the Lord of Hosts.
November is the month of the dead but also the month of the gloriously living in the eternal life and love of God!
All you saints of the Lord, pray for us. Pray for us who have such need of you.
From the column “Where Love Is God Is,” Restoration, November 1954.
