Tuesday November 1, 2005 Feast of All Saints
Reading I (Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14)
Reading II (1 John 3:1-3) Gospel (St. Matthew 5:1-12a)
Following is the Homily from the Mass of Reparation
Vigil of the Feast of All Saints
In the first reading today from the Book of Revelation, we hear the song of the elders around the throne of God as they prostrate themselves before the Lord and they cry out, Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might be to our God forever and ever. This is precisely the essence of our faith in Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. He is there in absolute humility, but even more astounding than that, He is present in a form that is entirely passive. This is God Who is Almighty, God Who created all things, God Who is completely active, and yet in the Blessed Sacrament He has hidden everything from our eyes and He asks simply that we would live upon our faith that He is truly present.
This understanding of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is so critical to us, not only because it defines who we are as Catholic people, but if we truly believe that Jesus is present then we do exactly what we have been doing tonight. Like the elders around the throne of God, we bow down before Him and we give Him the honor and the glory that is due to Him. It is so critical especially on a night like this that we do precisely that because there is another group of people that believes absolutely one hundred percent in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. Unfortunately, they worship Satan. The Satanists believe in the Real Presence of Jesus, and tragically this very night throughout the world they will be desecrating the Blessed Sacrament in every sick and disgusting form that one can imagine. When we think about Our Lord’s love for us, that He would remain hidden in the Blessed Sacrament even though He knows how many people will ignore Him, how many people will refuse to believe in Him, and even how many people will desecrate Him on nights like this, still because of His love for us He remains.
What He asks from us, who recognize that He is truly present, is that we will bow down before Him and we will worship Him and honor Him. That is precisely what this is all about tonight, to give to Him the glory and honor and praise and worship that is due. For ourselves, if we look at the context of those words, we recognize that in doing that we prepare ourselves for eternal life because in eternity we are going to bow down before the Lord and we are going to give Him praise and glory and honor. In this world, it is in faith; in the next world, it will be by sight, in pure love.
Saint Paul tells us that we walk by faith, not by sight. And as we go through this world living by faith, we know by faith that Jesus is truly present, but there are many who do not believe. Saint John tells us that the reason the world does not know us is that it does not know Him. Thanks be to God that He has given to us the grace to be able to recognize Him there, to know that He is truly present among us in the Blessed Sacrament, that He would give us the grace to be willing to come at this time of the night to be able to worship Him. It may be that in many of our lives we would just shrug that off and think it is no big deal. But you need to realize what a gift it is that God has given to you to have that kind of faith and to have that kind of love that you would sacrifice some of your sleep, that you would sacrifice many other things that you could be doing this night in order to give Him fitting worship and praise.
This is a wonderful gift that God has given, and now it is for us to respond because Saint John tells us that for those who do recognize Him, for those who love Him, they make themselves to be pure as He is pure. The purity of Christ is a purity of love because that is all that He is: He is love. He is right there in front of us in the Blessed Sacrament in pure love, and if we are to become like Him, it is to become love. The only way that we are going to become like Him is if we spend time with Him, if we grow in love with Him, and if we live the way that He lived. It is precisely what we see in the Gospel reading today, all the points of the Beatitudes which lay out for us what the Christian life is supposed to be. Of course, at the end of those Beatitudes, Our Lord tells us very clearly that if we are going to live this way we will be persecuted, we will be rejected, because the world does not recognize Him so it cannot recognize us if we are being like Him.
We can each one contemplate on this glorious feast all of those faithful souls who have gone before us and have already entered into the fullness of life in heaven, those who recognized that Our Lord was truly present in their midst and they made themselves like Him by washing their robes white in the Blood of the Lamb, they are not the external robes–it is their souls that have been washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb. They chose to live their life to be like Him.
One of the things that we hear many, many times (and I suspect they probably come out of our own mouths many times) is that even though we want to follow Jesus, we say things like “But I still need to be like everyone else. I still need to be enough like everyone else that they’ll accept me. I need to do this so that people do not think that I’m weird.” Why? If people do not recognize Jesus and they think you are weird because you do recognize Him and you are like Him, that is a great compliment and it is precisely what Saint John told us would happen if we are going to be like Him. The world will not recognize us because it did not recognize Him. So what we are striving for, unfortunately, is to be accepted by the worldly types. We want to be just like everyone else. Why? They do not recognize Christ, so if they recognize you as one of their own then you are not like Christ because they do not recognize Him. That is what we need to look at.
This is not asking anybody to do anything that would violate their dignity. It is not asking anybody to lower themselves or to be odd or strange. Rather it is asking each person to rise to the dignity with which God has created us, to become what we were created to be, and that is a saint. God wants us to be saints. Now having had the opportunity to spend time before Him, we need to ask: Do we want to be like Him? When you look at Him truly present in the Eucharist, do you want to be like Him Who is so humble that He would give Himself to us in the form of a piece of bread? Do you want to be like Him Who is so perfectly loving that He gives Himself entirely, leaving Himself totally vulnerable so that we can either love Him or reject Him, we can either violate Him or we can worship Him? Are we willing to be like Him Who was rejected? Are we willing to be like Him Who suffered for us and sacrificed Himself for us?
You see it is easy if we just look at it in some sort of fairytale way to say, “I want to be like Jesus.” But when you look at the mosaic above the altar [Father is referring to a mosaic which depicts the scene of the Crucifixion] and when you look at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, ask yourself: Do I want to be like Him? Will the world recognize me because I am like them, or will the world not recognize me because I am like Him? God wants us to be saints. He wants us to be like Him. We have chosen to be here tonight to make reparation, to worship Him, to honor Him, and to glorify Him. So recognizing the grace of God at work in our souls, now we need to ask ourselves: Am I willing to take this to the next level? Am I willing to really put into practice what it is that I profess? Am I willing to take what I have been doing here tonight, and what I will do later on here tonight, out into the streets by the way I live my life? That is what we have to ask ourselves. That is what the saints did, not necessarily only the saints whose names we all know, but all of the saints whom we honor tonight in such a glorious way. They recognized Him and they lived their lives to be like Him.
What the world needs today more than anything else is saints. Are you willing to be one of them? To be a saint is to be like Jesus. Are we willing to do it? It starts with what we have already been doing: recognizing Him truly present among us, worshiping Him, giving Him the honor and the glory that is due to Him. But if we are really going to give to Him what is due, it means to change our lives to become like Him. That is the greatest honor and glory that we can possibly give Him, to wash our robes clean in the Blood of the Lamb and to become like Him in all things. That is what each one of us really needs to meditate on. As we go through the rest of the Mass, ponder that reality. Do you want to be like everyone else, or do you want to be like the saints in heaven? Do we want to be like Jesus, or do we want to be like those who live a worldly life? That is the choice we have to make. Not just a fairytale choice of “I want to be like Jesus” but a real, true, honest choice in the depth of our being, a choice that says, “I am willing to change whatever is not of Him and whatever is not like Him so that I will be transformed into the very image and likeness of Jesus Christ.” That is what He is inviting each one of us to do. Are we willing to truly be like Jesus Christ?
Following is the Homily from the Morning Mass
on the Feast of All Saints
Today as we celebrate this glorious Feast of All Saints, we are reminded that one does not have to be among the most extraordinary of human beings who have ever walked the face of the earth, but that holiness is attainable by each and every one of us, and that each and every one of us has everything we need to be able to get to heaven. Now the question, of course, is whether we are cooperating with the grace of God so that we can live holy lives. Most of us, I suspect–hopefully, all of us–would certainly say that we want to go to heaven, but do we want to do what is necessary to get there? That is the real question we have to ask. As we consider this feast, from the greatest being Our Blessed Lady, all the way down to the least, the little babies who are destroyed through contraception, through abortion, and through all of the other unfortunate things that medical people are doing with little embryos these days, all of these souls that have entered into glory are praying for us. They are praying that we too are going to choose Christ, not in a generic way but in a very specific way: to do His Will.
When we think about all of the things that the saints have done, we then need to go to prayer and ask the Lord: What is it that You want of me? Now one thing that we can all know is that God wants obedience to the duties of our state in life; that is always a given. But even beyond that, what is it that He is asking for? We need to understand that with the condition in the world today as it is, and with the things that are to come very soon, the world today needs saints more than it ever has before. And if where sin abounds grace abounds all the more, and if God raises up His saints where He needs them the most, then the principle is a very simple one: We are going to see in our day the greatest saints that have ever lived. These people have not yet come to the fore. They will come to the fore as soon as it is time, and you could be one of them. There is no reason in the world why you cannot be. The question is whether we are willing to be.
What does it require to be one of these great saints? It simply requires a great love for God; that is all. Now that does not mean a gushy emotionalism when we think about God, but rather what it means is spending time in prayer seeking the Will of God and trying with all our might to carry it out. Knowing that we cannot do it ourselves, we look to God for the grace to do it. It is just that simple. It does not require doing huge extraordinary things. As Saint Therese made very clear, it means doing the ordinary things with extraordinary love. The one who loves the most is the greatest saint. It is just that simple.
Are we willing to do what God needs? We do not need to start all kinds of new social programs and all sorts of things that are already out there, causing us to run here and there; there are plenty of those already there. What we need are people who are willing to pray. We need people who are willing to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament because absolutely nothing–ZERO–will be accomplished without prayer. Nothing. You can spin your wheels all day long and rev your engine; it will sound great and it will look impressive but nothing will happen unless we are praying. All the things that are already in place, they are only going to succeed if people are praying. That is what we need more than anything right now. We need people who will pray.
So what do we need to do to become a great saint? We need to pray. We need to love God. We need to spend the time with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. It is a very simple proposition. The more time you spend with Him, the more obedient you are going to be to the duties of your state in life. If you spend the time in prayer, you will be a better husband or wife; you will do better at your job; whatever it is that God is calling you to be, you will do in a way that is much better than you have ever done before because you are united with Jesus in prayer. Beyond that you will find yourself growing in virtue (your family will probably be much appreciative!), more patient, more charitable, all the virtues that we need. It is very simple, yet it is the single most difficult thing you will ever do. It is the greatest privilege we can have. Are we willing to do it?
The world today needs saints. Are you one of them? Is God calling you–and He is– to be a saint? The call is there; the question has to do with the answer. God needs saints. The world needs saints. Are you willing to be among them?
* This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.
