All Saints – miracles of unexpected blessedness

Happy feast of All Saints. In honor of today’s holy day, I want to share with you a reflection on All Saints from my mentor, the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, SJ. Rahner asks, what mystery, what “word peculiar to itself … has been spoken by God into the Church and is intended through it to reach into our hearts” this day?

When we celebrate All Saints we have in mind chiefly those saints who are anonymous, the unknown saints who have not made any general impact in the Church and are not mentioned in her praises….

We celebrate in our hearts the fact that we can say: “there are some who actually have arrived, who are perfected, who are already in a state of blessedness, who have attained their due measure of perfection and have not wasted their lives, [persons] to whom something improbable has happened: to be drawn out of and beyond themselves in love, persons in whom one does not find emptiness and hidden egoism when they are stripped bare and exposed to view, persons who have not wept in vain, who have found life through death and the eternal kingdom through loss, persons who by the everyday conduct of their ordinary lives have achieved a dimension of life which is to an undreamt of extent absolute and of such value … ‘once for all’, and that it is worthy never more to perish for all eternity….

We might add, therefore, as a further message which this festival has for us, that God can make all into saints, into miracles and masterpieces so full of unexpected blessedness that one’s heart can be transfixed with delight at them a whole eternity through….

Certainly we celebrate All Saints sub una veneratione, and therefore the unknown saints as well, those who lived quietly in the land, the poor and the little ones who were great only in God’s eyes, those who go unacclaimed in any of the rolls of honour belonging to the Church or to world history … those nameless saints who are consecrated in silence and upon the private altars of our own hearts….

In the praise of All Saints, however, we are celebrating the Church herself, who, even though she is made up of ourselves, and therefore remains the Church of sinners, of the poor and insignificant, of the despondent and exasperated sinners, is still the Church of the saints, the Church which is so beloved by Christ with a love unto death — almost, one might say, a fierce love — that she can no longer escape this love. In all the saints we praise the power of that grace which, so to say, makes use of [people] in order to bring about our salvation, which gives what it demands, which sets us free for that liberty in which we are the freed and the blessed.

Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. VIII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2. Trans. by David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971) pp. 24-29.