“Beloved, we are God’s children now.” These words from the second reading today are the words that I think all of us long for deep down. We all want to belong and have this innate desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves. There was no better feeling as a child than knowing the love of parents or family members who believed in us and made us feel like part of the family.
God has a family too. Today we celebrate the Solemnity of all Saints, in other words, we celebrate God’s family. The beautiful thing about today is it gives us almost a time warp glimpse of our future. If we believe that each of us was created by God to eventually fully share in his divine life, then looking at the lives of the saints is the perfect way to know our destiny.
If you break the human condition down into different phases, it seems that we have a point before the fall of man, our state after the fall, and our final state of pure bliss in heaven. But we don’t have to wait for heaven to start to experience it. I have used this analogy before, but think about the most delicious meal you have ever eaten. You get the immediate taste and pleasure of that meal, but it isn’t fully realized until it is digested and used for energy in our bodies.
In a similar way, salvation is ours. We have a taste of it because of what Christ did on the cross. We get glimpses here on earth of what our state in heaven will be like. This is why sacraments come to us through physical signs. They are signs here on earth of the ultimate glory we will have one day in heaven. We taste the glory now, but we get the fullness of it when we reach our final destiny.
So on this day that we celebrate all the saints, I encourage you to pick one saint for the month of November and focus on their life. Let them be a shining example of not only how to live a virtuous life here on earth, but as an example of the glory that is to come. When we constantly set our sights on being holy here, we already begin to enter into the state we will have in heaven. And although we cannot enter it perfectly on this earth, we can get a taste, a glimmer, of our complete unity one day with God.
From all of us here at Diocesan, God bless!
Daily Reading
Thursday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Reading 1 PHIL 3:3-8A Brothers and sisters: We are the circumcision, we who worship through the Spirit of God, who boast in Christ Jesus and do not put our confidence…
Saint of the Day
Blessed John Duns Scotus
Influential High Middle Ages philosopher-theologian, Blessed John Duns Scotus, shaped Catholic and secular thinking profoundly.
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