Making Saints of All Our Souls

Thoughts on All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day (Nov 1 & 2) 2025

Readings – Revelation 21.1-7; Luke 6.20-31; John 14.1-7


Christ’s insistence that it is the poor and powerless, the unpopular and the grieving who are the real success-stories of the gospel (because, as the New English Bible put it, they are those who ‘know their need of God’) is a surprising and unsettling bit of topsy-turvy thinking, ideal for our reflections at this time of year. At a most basic level, the Beatitudes (Luke’s version arguably more insistently than Matthew’s) instruct us to be emptied of anything that impedes the grace of God in making us fit for a heavenly reward. The ‘pure in heart’ focus on God alone, and so must we if we are to take our place with all the Saints in God’s eternal love.

In St John’s gospel, great emphasis is placed on the invitation to humanity to be clothed in the endless embrace between the Father and the Son (Jn 14.3, 10). This generosity is described as the ‘many mansions’ of the Father’s house, in any one of which we can surely all find a heavenly lodging.

For Christians, this process of being emptied of self-sufficiency, and refilled with the light and life of God, requires complete immersion in the gospel, and a 24/7 devotion to the exercise of its priorities through the life of the (local) Church. It requires us (as St Benedict teaches his monks) to live lives of ‘a Lenten character’, focusing on prayer, simplicity and acts of charity. This is not tantamount to a life of miserable deprivation. Rather, it frees us to be rooted in absolute reality, and to derive all our joy from the presence of God.

This is wonderfully illustrated in the life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century Spanish dandy, soldier and ladies’ man who, while recovering from injuries sustained in the battle of Pamplona, was confined to a castle wholly devoid of entertaining literature, and was thus limited to a diet of the Bible and various Lives of Christ and the Saints. To his immense surprise, he discovered that, whereas his reading and daydreaming about military and romantic pursuits had left him feeling dissatisfied and disconsolate, his new attention to the living of the gospel and the imitation of Christ brought him extraordinary consolation and peace. This should not surprise us. All that we know of the Universe – its infinite variety, beauty and mystery – speaks compellingly of a loving Creator who is greater even than Everything; and who, in the resurrection of Christ, re-creates and foreshadows the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ of the Revelation to John.

This story of God-making-and-making-new has been at the heart of Europe, and told right across the globe, for approaching two millennia. It is the story of Christ as utterly compelling Reality – what he calls ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life’. He is the perfect expression and fullness of God, come to earth to enlighten all people and draw them to himself by the magnetic power of his love. It is a love seen in his life and death, and vindicated by God in his rising from the grave.

It is this same Christ who comes to people today, and makes himself known in prayer and worship, Word and Sacrament.

It is our conviction that all people, all souls are invited into an eternal home in the epicentre of reality. The grace that we therefore pray for is simply that we will not stand in the way of God’s transforming love, but will be, as it were, a window letting God’s light shine through us, exactly as is prayed at the end of a baptism. The priest gives a lighted candle to the newly-baptised at the end of the ceremony, as the congregation half-prays, half-instructs them to ‘Shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father.’

Of course, goodness and selflessness are not exclusive to Christians, and it would be ludicrously arrogant to suggest it. But scholars increasingly point out that, without the universal spread of the Christian gospel, there could not have been the propagation and normalising of the sort of care and concern for others which were wholly unknown in the ancient world, but which are a seen today to be fundamental, a commonplace to be protected in any truly civilised society.

As we peer through the November gloom, and see the church lights still burning brightly, we might think again of our own calling to be saints, and to return once again to the fountain of new life, Christ risen, ascended and glorified.