Today is the Feast of All Saints! The word "saint" simply means holy or holy one and comes from the Latin sanctus (holy), the root of which is sancire (to make sacred). In biblical times a saint was simply a Christian, one who is holy, who is called to be holy. The New American Bible usually translates this word, (h)agios as "holy ones" but other translations use the word "saints" following the Latin translation which was sanctum or sancti. When the term is used in the Bible, it more frequently refers to those living than those who have died. All of us are saints.

One of the true gifts of our Catholic faith is the teaching on the communion of saints, a belief that we express each week in the creed. The communion of saints simply expresses the fact that as Christian community, we are in relationship with all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us. Our relationships transcend time and space. Hopefully we experience this intuitively when someone we love dies. Our relationship with that loved one does not end at death. The relationship is transformed, but does not end. When I am explaining the communion of saints to those who are becoming Catholic, I start with our relationships to the living. If I am struggling with something, I might ask my friends and family to pray for me. Because our relationships do not end at death, when a loved one dies, I can continue to ask him/her to pray for me. Taking it a step further, I have a grandma who died before I was born. While I have never met her, I feel as if I know her because of the stories that have been told about her over the years. I ask her to pray for me in the same way I ask the grandparents I knew to pray for me. The canonized saints are like that. They are Christians who have gone before us as models of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. While we have never met them, we come to know them through the stories that our family, the Church, passes down about them. We form relationships to them through those stories and traditions. We ask them to pray for us in the same way we ask our family and friends to pray for us. We do not technically "pray to them," we ask them to pray to God with us. Also implied in that statement is that we do not ask them to pray to God instead of us praying to God ourselves, but rather we ask them to join their prayers to God to our prayers to God. The fact that a saint is canonized simply means that the Church has definitively declared the person to be in heaven with God. It is important to note that the Church has never definitively declared anyone to be in hell.

All Saints Day is a great day to reflect on those in our lives who have been examples of what it means to be a Christian and to thank God for the gift of those people in our lives. It is also a great day to reflect on what it means to each of us to be a saint. Do we make the world a holier place through our words and deeds? Do people experience something of God's love when they encounter us? Do we image Christ for others? Ultimately that is what a saint, canonized or not, is and is called to be, an image of Christ in the world. Have a blessed All Saints!