All Saints Sunday - Rector's Rambling for November 5, 2023

Having celebrated All Souls Day on Thursday, with Requiem Masses at Elmwood Cemetery and in our own Chapel, we celebrate today a feast day that actually occurred on Wednesday, November 1st.

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints on this the 5th day of the Octave - major feast days are commemorated for 8 days so that at least one Sunday occurs in it.  We celebrate those who have died and by God’s grace lived lives of heroic virtue!  The Church holds them up as  examples of  Christian lives well lived in faith.

Remember that anyone can be a saint because it is God who initiates the process.  We can only have faith because God has overwhelmed us with His Grace: a free, and unmerited gift from God whereby we given the ability to have faith and to battle against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.  God is making available to all of us the blessing needed to become saints -  the challenge for us is to cooperate with that Grace to allow our lives to be changed as God sees fit.  The biggest obstacle to becoming a saint is our own self-will.  I am the one standing in my own way of being the saint He wants me to be.  But when we fail, we repent and try again.

Reading the lives of the saints reminds me that I have a long way to go, but the stories of their lives encourages me that God can do it!

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Thank you to everyone who contributed to the October Food, Coat, and Blanket Drive.  Mark and Lorraine Covington from Georgia Street Community Collective filled up the cab and bed of their pickup truck with our donations, and expressed  gratitude for our continued support of their community ministry.