November 1 All Saints Day

All Saints’ Day

Essay by Catherine Woodiwiss, Senior Associate Web Editor at Sojourners.

“[In America, our cultural knowledge of saints is limited: we think of the saints of Renaissance art or “Virgin Mary” apparitions on highway underpasses; cities on the West Coast whose names remind us of  cruel Spanish expeditions in the name of Catholicism. The saints we think of are sanitized, or grisly, or their enormous suffering tricks of the mind. Above all, they are zealous.

But the tradition of All Saints’ Day isn’t about celebrating impossible characters… The day is universally acknowledged as a time to remember that all who claim the faith — past, present, and future — all who are part of the same body, they comprise what the author of Hebrews called “so great a cloud of witnesses” There’s plenty of room for faith heroes in this landscape. 

However, it is equally true that some of the Christians we honor — with the formal designation of “saint” or more generally as theologians, activists, and social justice leaders — are not always wholly admirable people, or even particularly special. 

They were very human… They were prone to angst and anger, doubt and self-doubt, inanity and infidelity, boastful hypocrisy and humble brilliance. The lives of these saints are, frankly, can be seen as a continuation of the complicated archetypal characters in the Bible, each with a story to tell us, each with their own challenges to know and avoid, who still were able, despite it all, to maintain their faith, and inspire others to hold on to their convictions….

When our human natures are fully understood, it is a case of “both/and”  and how an understanding of what motives, values and ideals we hold can work in us in ways that move us, shape us, or inspire us. We, in our all too subjective human society, need religious role models, and there’s something reassuring about the fact that our Christian heroes are not made of substantively different material than our fallible cultural ones that we so joyfully celebrate or mock on Halloween, whether they are political leaders, Hollywood stars, or comic book action figures…

For those heroes we place within our church, what distinguishes these saints is their spiritual curiosity, their transformative encounter with a divine God, and their radical love they lived and shared with others… 

The saints remind us that sometimes we get a little bit closer than we can reasonably expect. And they give us hope that perhaps one day we’ll be remembered — not for our heroic feats, but for loving a divine God, and each other, a little more fiercely than we thought we could.)”