Fr Don’s Blog: Saints and Souls

Nathan Soderblom once stated, “Saints are people who make it a little bit easier for the rest of us to be good.”  They are light bearers, they are trail angels, they are people with rough edges like everyone else but who have somehow remained focused on God and our destiny toward a better existence.  Or as Frederick Buechner wrote: “A saint is a life-giver, a human being with the same sort of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us yet, if a saint touches your life, you become alive in a new way.” 

As October turns to November each year while darkness and chill return to our atmosphere, we celebrate Los Dias de los Muertos (The Days of the Dead).  In the church it is via the Feasts of All Halos Eve, All Saints, and All Souls on three consecutive days that bridge the two months.  It is a time for us to commemorate and honor our deceased loved ones and pray for their unity with God in an existence beyond earth’s realm.  At the same time, it is an occasion for us to consider our own inevitable death while seeking to imitate holy and wholesome people who possess and share happiness and joy despite their struggles.

On some level, these three days mirror the three days of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection.  Here we contemplate the inevitable demise of every person, including ourselves; we reflect upon possibilities that await us, including purgatory, heaven, and hell; and we hope for stardom, not just achievement in this existence but a corporeality with the stars in heaven as saints.  As our Catholic Mass for the Dead prays, “Grant that those who were united with your Son in an earthly death like His may now be one with Him in a heavenly resurrection.”  Children’s costumes display an array of characters along the life-death continuum: scary ones that symbolize the fright of dying to those of superheroes that symbolize great achievement and victory.  Those attending Catholic schools often follow it up by dressing as saints to celebrate the festival of hallowed ones, those who point us to God and help us become alive in a new way.

Writer Annie Dillard encouraged her followers to “write as though you were dying.  At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.  That is, after all, the case.”  I think it is true that if we write, speak, act, and proceed in living with life-death intensity, we will more purposefully move toward the hour in which we transition from this world to God’s eternal care.  Los Dias de los Muertos call us to beware of what happens to us all while it also beckons us to be the kind of people who make it a little bit easier for others to be good.