Most people who go through the standard motions this weekend, dressing up, trick-or-treating, eating an obscene amount of sugar, most of these people will enjoy these activities, oblivious to the fact that Halloween is fundamentally and originally a Catholic holiday.  There are really three important days, starting today: Halloween itself, which is of course, All Hallows’ Eve, the day before All Hallows, all holy ones, also known as the Vigil of All Saints; followed by All Saints’ Day itself on Monday; and then the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, All Souls’ Day, on Tuesday.  You only get little hints of it in the secular observance of Halloween, but these are three incredibly important days in the life of any Christian believer.  And since these days start this weekend, I thought we might just focus a bit today on what these feasts are. 

Although the modern world has become a little more interested in ghosts on All Hallows’ Eve, you can see how that day and that night would have a certain focus on the afterlife, on saints and spirits.  Because it’s the Vigil of the Feast of All of the Saints.  All Saints’ Day is a great feastday because, as the name suggests, it celebrates all of the saints; first of all, those that we know about, the particularly remarkable figures of salvation history, Mary and Joseph, Peter and Paul, Patrick and Benedict, a day when we rejoice in towering figures such as these: we rejoice in them all together, in how magnificent the Heavenly Host of all the Saints truly is when seen in their fullness.  All Saints’ Day is also the feast that celebrates those holy ones who are forgotten, who are unknown, whose holiness was seen only by God: this Feast’s consoling and magnificent doctrine is that the greater company of saints, most of those who now rejoice in heaven, were normal, ordinary, now largely forgotten to the world, with flesh like ours, weaknesses like ours, temptations like ours: sinners who never gave up in the face of their own weakness, and whose perseverance is now rewarded with Eternal Life.  Our Lord wants All Saints’ Day to be your Feast Day one day. 

Tuesday is All Souls’ Day: and there’s a difference.  All Souls is the day for those who haven’t quite made it…yet.  The day when we pray for those who have died and who are still completing their journey towards heaven in the merciful experience known as purgatory.  Purgatory is not fundamentally, first of all, about punishment.  It’s about the promise and hope of God’s endless mercy.  Sin cannot enter into heaven, by definition.  Heaven is a state of being in which sin and all of its effects are absolutely excluded.  Sin cannot exist in heaven.  Unfortunately, despite our good intentions, none of us can claim that we’re sinless.  Jesus won salvation for us, but to be saved does not excuse us from the consequences of our actions.  This day reminds us that we are responsible for our sins, for those ways we fall short of God’s perfect plan for us.  In an age of avoiding accountability, we’re reminded that, with God, we can’t escape it: we have the privilege, in fact, of being accountable for our actions: of having the freedom to choose the course of our lives, and the integrity to live with the consequences of both our good and our bad choices.  But our hope is rooted in the knowledge that our bad choices don’t have to define us forever. God gives us so many ways to purify ourselves, to heal from our sins.  But if we don’t quite get there on this earth, if we can’t quite attain that heroic level of personal holiness in this life, that’s where God once again shows the depth of his mercy for us, and his deep desire that we should one day live with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven.  And so, he gives us the opportunity to finish what we started: to complete the cleansing of our souls, assisted by the prayers and sacrifices offered by those still on earth: that is what purgatory is.  And All Souls’ Day is the day when the entire Church throughout the world offers prayers and sacrifices for those who are there, completing their final preparations to enter heaven.  These next days are a wonderful opportunity to remember and pray for our loved ones who have gone before.  These are days to go visit the cemetery and pray there, either in general or for specific persons you love who have passed from this life. 

We hope that Tuesday, All Souls’ Day, will be our Feast Day for a while.  And we hope people will pray for us on that day in coming years and decades and centuries, as we’re finishing up the work of getting ready for heaven.  All Souls’ Day will likely be our feast day for a while.  But then, when the time is right and the Grace of God and the prayers of our fellow believers have healed us from all that stands in the way, then, we will be able to back up a day, and the Feast of All Saints, will finally, gloriously, be our feast day as well.  And so we ask God to do what it takes to get us there, to number us among those who minister at his Throne for all eternity: those who rejoice with us even now, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom we, for evermore, please God, may be one.