Dies Natalis

Solemnity of All Saints

Today the Church’s calendar does something rather beautiful and rare. All Saints falls on a Sunday. The Lord’s Day and the feast of all the holy ones of God coincide. All Saints and every Sunday ranks as a solemnity, a first class feast in rank. When both days converge, we could call it a double solemnity! A First First! This is no mere coincidence of dates. It is a quiet homily from the liturgy itself.

Sunday is the Day of the Lord—the day of His death and, more decisively, of His Resurrection. Every Sunday we stand again at the empty tomb and proclaim that death does not have the final word. The early Christians called the day of a martyr’s death his or her dies natalis— his day of birth - his birthday into eternal life. What the world saw as an ending, the Church recognised as a beginning: the day a Christian is reborn into heaven. So, when All Saints falls on a Sunday, the liturgy holds two birthdays together: the Resurrection of the Lord and the heavenly birthday of every saint, known and unknown. Our own death, if we die in the Lord, will one day be our dies natalis too.

Most of us can only imagine the day of our death, the exact moment of our expiration. Would we go out with a big bang, or with our loved ones surrounding our deathbed, or would we die an ignoble or lonely death on a hospital bed or home for the aged? No crystal ball or horoscope or Tarot card reading will be able to give us an exact account of how it would all end. But scripture does assure us that it would not be as frightening as we would imagine. St John in his epistle which we heard in the second reading tells us: “what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.”

The readings today lift the veil. In the vision of John in the Book of the Apocalypse, which we heard in the first reading, we see the great multitude that no one can count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, washed in His blood, holding palm branches of victory. These are the ones who have already celebrated their dies natalis. They have passed through the great tribulation and now live in the unending Sunday of heaven.

How did they get there? The mystery of or the secret to their sainthood is found in them living out the gospel values which we had just heard. The Gospel places before us the Beatitudes—the very template of that sanctity.

“Happy are the poor in spirit… the gentle… those who mourn… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… those who are persecuted…”

These are not simply nice spiritual attitudes. They are the shape of a life that has already begun to die with Christ so that it may rise with Him. Sainthood is not a sudden overnight success story. It is gain incrementally, a little step at a time, a little dying to our ourselves here and there, and finally bearing fruit in a life of fidelity following Christ. The Beatitudes are the very programme of the dies natalis. They describe people who have learned to lose in the world’s eyes so that they may win in God’s. For example, poverty of spirit is the death of self-sufficiency. Meekness is the death of the need to dominate. Mourning is the death of false consolations. Hunger for righteousness is the death of indifference. Mercy is the death of the score-keeping heart. Purity of heart is the death of divided loves. Peacemaking is the death of the ego that thrives on conflict. Persecution is the final, public death of the self that still seeks worldly approval. Each beatitude promises an aspect of eternal life but demands a willingness to die to some inordinate attachment.

Contrary to popular opinion, the saints are not those who never stumbled. In fact, some have taken a mighty deep tumble in their lives. They, however, are those who allowed the grace of the Cross to turn every fall into a deeper surrender. A saint is simply a Christian who has taken the Sunday mystery—death and resurrection of Christ—and lived it daily until the final Sunday of his or her dies natalis. The Beatitudes are the ordinary path by which that daily dying and rising happens. They are not reserved for the extraordinary. They are the template for every baptised person who wants heaven to be more than a pious hope.

Today we celebrate the unnamed as much as the named. The grandmothers who prayed the rosary through decades of quiet fidelity. The fathers who carried the Cross of family responsibility without applause. The young people who chose purity when the world offered everything else. The worker who chooses integrity over politics or corruption. The sick who offered their suffering in union with Christ. The martyrs whose blood still cries out. All of them have already kept their dies natalis. And they cheer us on from the other side of the veil, because they know the secret: the same Lord who rose on the first day of the week is the One who will raise us on the last.

So, when this Sunday of All Saints comes round, let us hear the double invitation. Live the Lord’s Day every day, the Easter joy that never ends —die a little more to self, rise a little more into the life of grace. Let the Beatitudes shape your ordinary choices. Then, when your own dies natalis arrives, it will not be a strange or fearful day. It will simply be the final Sunday, the Easter that never ends, the definitive birthday into the kingdom where every tear is wiped away and the Lamb is the light forever. May the great cloud of witnesses who already celebrate their heavenly birthday intercede for us, so that one day this feast will be our feast too. Amen.