All Saints’ Day comes very fittingly at the end of the Church’s Year.  It began with Advent with its call to penitence and its stress upon our need of a Saviour who came at Christmas to save us from that spiritual separation from God which is the outer darkness referred to in the Gospels.  So at the very outset our attention was directed at once to the end, to Our Blessed Lord who will judge us according to the opportunities which he is even now giving us.

And as the year draws to its close, there comes the Feast of All Saints in its blaze of glory, when our eyes are turned to those holy men, women and children whose salvation is complete in the Courts of Heaven.  Thus the end of the year, like its beginning, focuses on the next life.  That is the faithful Christian’s true home – not this transitory and troubled life here below – and while we pursue our earthly life we are reminded of the necessity to keep our eyes firmly fixed on that life with Christ and the Blessed Saints, and to look not to the things that are seen but to “…what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (NRSV, 2 Corinthians 4:18).

And such a reminder of the supernatural destiny of human beings is more than ever needed in the world of today, when people’s minds are swayed only by material values, and their hearts are occupied only with material attractions, so that, as Our Blessed Lord said of the people of his own day in Palestine, “…seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (NRSV, Matthew 13:13).  And so they are blind and deaf to that basic truth of human life which St Augustine the Great expressed in famous words, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”. (1)

So for faithful Christians who in St Paul’s words, “…have an undying love for our Lord Jesus Christ” (NRSV, Ephesians 6:24), there awaits at their journey’s end that same eternal joy of beholding God himself, which even now the Saints possess and which is the reward of all those who truly love and obey Our Blessed Lord.

Reference

1. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) Confessions, Book I, Chapter I.  (Words quoted above are slightly amended).  Available from:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf101.vi.I_1.I.html (Accessed 15 October 2011) (Internet).