Tuesday is All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation. More than an obligatory feast day, our pause each November 1st celebrates this wild, infectious, holy community of men and women in heaven; their unique personalities, abilities, character, language, and ethnicity radiates the promise of God’s image and calling within each individual’s earthly life. And their intercessory grace continues to guide us toward the light of eternal life, to one day join that great community of saints. Honoring this, our Catholic tradition, I leave you with the following thought on sainthood by Robert Ellsberg from his book, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, and the words of several saints. “What do they have in common? They did not apply themselves to being ‘saints.’ If anything, they applied themselves seriously to the task of bing human, understanding this vocation in the profound sense reflected in the old formulas of the catechism: ‘Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world and to be happy with in the next.’ No, the saints are not perfect humans. But in their own individual fashion they became authentic human beings, endowed with the capacity to awaken that vocation in others. . . .to call someone a saint means that his or her life should be taken with the utmost seriousness. It is a proof that the gospel can be lived.” “One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” (St. Joan of Arc) “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls” (Mother Teresa) “Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me.” (St. Patrick) “For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.” (St. Teresa of Avila) “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” (St. Pope John Paul II) “I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.” (St. Bernard of Clairvaux). “No one heals himself by wounding another.” (St. Ambrose of Milan) “The giver of every good and perfect gift has called upon us to mimic God’s giving, by grace, through faith, and this is not of ourselves.” (St. Nicholas) “Actions speak louder than words. Let your words teach and your actions speak.” (St. Anthony of Padua) “Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.” (St. Oscar Romero) God Bless, Fr. Tim FYI: "From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us!" (St. Teresa of Avila)