All Saints Day Homily 2024

Many of us think All Saints Day is time to worship or pray to the saints.  Others think  there's no way we could ever be as holy and worthy of heaven as those saints were, so why bother trying?  But actually the Solemnity of All Saints is a time to examine the lives of all the saints, both those bearing the title Saint and those who also reside in heaven but who haven't been given the title, and ask ourselves what we can learn from their lives.  Every saint shows us the way to eternal life and provides an example of how to live here on earth in God-fearing ways.  Those ways boil down to two words that we don't usually like in today's culture: sacrifice and surrender.  If we sacrifice our lives for the sake of others' and surrender the things we want to the things Jesus wants for us, heaven's gates will surely be open to us when we arrive!