This feast is a feast of immense Christian hope! It unites our present, and our past, with our future. And yet, that future is somehow already present because the saints see us, they love and pray for us, they encourage us to keep going. If we long to be with them, as hopefully we all do, their longing for us is even greater. Death is not a barrier to our hope and love for them, nor is it one to their loving intercession for us.

Moreover, when we speak of the communion of all saints, we are not only speaking about those who are in heaven. Communion cuts across time and space, something we all know from our experience of love for our living and dead family members and friends. The saints are in heaven, we are on earth, but we are all in the same communion, just in differing ways and degrees. For what is Communion at root anyway if not the presence and power of Christ in and through his Holy Spirit? And what is that, if not love itself, love in its utmost purity, fullness and most personal, love as divine selflessness which has conquered human selfishness?

Everyone and everything exist only in Christ and so everything and everyone is quite simply in communion with Him. For some, sadly, that communion is something they don’t want, they reject, either by their explicit choice or by the way they live. They want to be out of communion, that is, literally in ex-communion. Or they want to be in communion only on their own terms. But we cannot be in Communion with Christ unless it is on His terms. It is He who sets the order of things, the order of reality, the order of truth and of love. It follows that we cannot truly be in Communion with one another if we are not in Communion with Christ.

And so, the communion of saints in heaven works tirelessly with Christ for our sakes so that we will never want to break that communion either by our conscious choices or by the way we live. And if some have broken communion, and have not yet died, the saints work and pray to bring about a change of heart and of lifestyle so that it can be reestablished. For they are aware that we, like them, must take part in the great persecution of which the book of the Apocalypse speaks. Our robes will not be washed white in the blood of the Lamb if we don’t share in that persecution. It is not so much the persecution caused by other human beings, as the one orchestrated by the powers of the great Dragon and enemy of our humanity. It is the onslaught of temptation and seduction with its subtle and clever ploys to deceive us into thinking that evil is good and that good is evil. Jesus describes those who undergo this persecution for His sake as blessed because our reward will be great in heaven, not because of any happiness here below.

So, the communion of saints is not some idyllic and romantic picture of living happily ever after. It is the point of arrival for those who take the project of human life seriously, who courageously open up their hearts and minds to the truth of Jesus Christ and to the love which empowers them to choose the good because it is good, even if it feels bad; and who reject the bad because it is bad, even if it feels good. It is the company of the truly free who held up unceasingly the light of the Gospel on their lives to show up and root out all that was born of the lies of pride and self-absorption. It is the band and the bond of those who refuse to submit to phony values or to live counterfeit lives. As St. John puts it in the second reading, they did all they could do to try to be as pure, that is, as real as Christ because they perceived in Him their own fulfilment and the judge and redeemer of their souls. The communion of saints is where the beatitudes taught by Christ in the Gospel passed from being beautiful words to being beautiful lives and souls. It is the living embodiment of the Gospel of Christ in human hearts and fellowship.

Our path as theirs is a gradual consecration of the mind by the truth and doctrine of the Gospel; of the heart by the self-sacrificing agape of Christ; and of the body by the sacraments of the Incarnate Son. That gradual consecration leads us to transubstantiation into the Risen and Ascended Lord of Creation and Redemption, until we are finally transfigured in glory with Him to the praise and honour of the Father. At the end of time, the Communion of saints will be the final outcome of the process which was begun when the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary and united the divine and the human in the eternal marriage between God and His entire creation.

If these words sound sublime, or even too sublime, they are, because no heart can conceive of the things which God has in store for those who love Him. These are the things which the communion of saints has begun to enjoy but which they cannot enjoy completely until we are all with them beyond death and beyond history. Our hope in Christ is not for this mortal life, and so we must not live it as if it were enough or even everything. It is but a seed in comparison with the magnificent Tree of Life which stands in the centre of Eden. It is but a shadow which dimly reflects the blinding glory of the Holy Trinity.

We are not made for this earth only, but for the new heavens and the new earth, and so every day we must beseech the Lord and His saints to renew us inwardly to fight the good fight and run the race to the finish. And we must dare to hope that, one day, however unlikely it might seem to us now, this feast day of all saints will be celebrated in our honour, too. For, in the end, there is no greater honour; in fact, there is no other honour at all.