"All Saints Day is Nothing Less Than a Dare"

Deacon Greg's homily for All Saints Day is a must read:

This gospel, the Beatitudes, may be one of the most familiar in all of scripture. Its litany of what it means to be “blessed” can be seen as the ultimate blueprint for living the Christian life.

In the context of today’s feast, it tells us: this is how you become a saint.

But do we really understand what that means? As we mark this All Saints Day, it is tempting to put saints, literally, on a pedestal.  Just look around this church.  We see saints in stained glass, in wood, in marble. They are plaster figures we put on a shelf and decorate with flowers or adorn with halos.  We collect them in holy cards and venerate them in icons.

But to think of the saints that way reduces them to something merely decorative—and risks making this feast seem unnecessary.

This day is necessary.  We need to hear what this feast says to us. It is a summons, a call, a challenge to every one of us who is here.  Looked at another way: All Saints Day is nothing less than a dare.

This feast says to us: dare to be more.

Dare to be a saint.

Some of us may hear that and laugh. Sainthood is a noble ambition, an ideal, but is this something we can realistically expect to attain?

The short answer is: yes.

Because the great truth about saints, something we so easily forget, is that they were just like us.

Flesh and blood, strength and weakness.  They were people of appetites and longings, ambitions and disappointments, vanities and eccentricities. They were simple sinners just like the rest of us.

That was how they began.  But that wasn’t the whole story.

Read the whole story.

Just do it.

Deacon Greg rocked this one.