All Saint's Day, 2022, reflection

Below is a reflection I offered at a funeral on November 3, 2022, arranged by the Catholic Charities office and attended by volunteers of the Society of Saint Joseph of Arimathea. We celebrated All Saint's Day with a choir of Catholic high school students and laid to rest Willie Fitzpatrick. Willie died several years ago, and his cremains were recently found in a dumpster. They were turned over to the coroner's office, who contacted Catholic Charities to help with find a final resting place for Willie. The funeral, as with all SSJOA funerals, took place at the city's Meadow View cemetery in Valley Station, KY.

In the Apostle Paul’s letters to the churches of his day, he addresses faithful Christian members with a Greek word that is translated in some English Bibles as the word “saints”, as we heard in the New Testament reading. It is clear that Paul considers those saints as faithful members of the church wherever they are and whoever they are, rather than people of exceptional virtue or who are or were in extraordinary circumstances. If we take that original meaning of a saint, we are among saints right here: past saints recalled by the graves around us, and present saints, alive and gathered together here. The Gospel reading for All Saints day is the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Luke, which gives us a very different view of who a saint could be: the poor, the hungry, the rejected. Paul doesn’t specify what sort of lives were led by the saints he is referring to, but I would imagine that some of them are who Jesus blessed in the Beatitudes. I would add to that the addicted and the estranged, some of whom hurt themselves and others in this life, and some of whom are buried around us. This is counterintuitive to our idea of who is good and bad, who is a saint or a sinner on earth. But if we look at death from the point of view of Paul’s living saints, death is a transition from this life to the next, and we have all experienced the transition of a saint in this way. And in that transition is the hope of resurrection of not just saints who lived a holy life, but of those who have lived an unsaintly life in this world. What was not possible for them in this life is possible in the next life. This is what Christ’s resurrection, and our resurrection look like through the eyes of God’s unconditional love for all of us, saints and potential saints alike. This is the love we bring to this place week after week, to bury with dignity anyone brought to us, regardless of the life that they lived. We are not their judges. We are instead their family for their last moment here before they are buried.