Living The Beatitudes: How To Become A Saint | Solemnity of All Saints - November 1, 2025 (Year C)

This week, I'm going to focus on the Holy Day coming up this Saturday, the Solemnity of All Saints.  It's an interesting set of readings - given the day, I would have expected readings more focused on the first saints and their lives.  Instead, we are given almost a blueprint, and, to my understanding, it runs backwards from the order in which we hear the word this weekend.  In Matthew's Gospel Reading, we hear Jesus give us the beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, in which we are given guides on how to live.  Following these and orienting our lives and actions towards being on the right side of the beatitudes will almost certainly lead to us among the God's children discussed in our second reading, leading us to hopefully be worthy of the status of those worshippers glimpsed in our first reading from Revelation.  It is fitting that it starts with Jesus and His Love radiates into our lives and becomes the basis of faith from which to build.  We must do our best to live by Jesus's example and teachings so that we can be like the saints that we remember on this day.  All those saints who came before faced similar issues to us and have persevered in hopes that their faith and devotion would be rewarded, albeit in different manners due to the changes in context surrounding humanity that each era brings and that each persons' own circumstances contribute.  So do not think of the saints as lofty ideals removed from us, but see them for what they are - examples of humans made of the same flesh and the same blood as each of us, who lived up to the promises they made to God.

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