All Saints 2026
Apocalypse 7: 2-4, 9-14 1 John 3: 1-3; Matthew 5: 1-12
November is the kindest month. “RUBBISH!” I hear you cry. “It is not kind at all. It is a grey, damp, miserable, cold month. It has nothing at all to commend it.
“Thanks to global warming, it no longer even presages a bright December, with crisp shining days, a golden sun in a blue sky beaming down upon a pure white landscape. Nowadays, November is simply recycled in December, and in January. What is kind about that?”
“True!” I may reply. I too recall the thrill of the first snowflakes of the winter, drifting down ever more thickly, turning the dullest landscape into a wonderland, presenting us with what GK Chesterton’s Father Brown suggested could be termed “White Magic”.
I remember my very first day at school, in January 1955, the heart-rending misery of the occasion alleviated by the surrounding snow. I can revisit my first winter at Grammar School, and the boarder in our class from an army family, who had spent his first eleven years in Kenya, now gazing out of the window at this unfamiliar spectacle.
“Pay attention, lad! Anyone would think you had never seen snow before!”
“I haven’t, sir!” A sizeable proportion of today’s youngsters, growing up in England, could make the same reply. No snowball-throwing, no snowman-building, no tobogganing: one of my classmates, now deceased, gloried in the name Alan Snowball; a name which may sound mysterious in a few years’ time. Nor is the disappearance of an exhilarating experience our greatest loss: we are also being reminded of the increasing peril posed by global warming. Where is the kindness of November now?
A fair point, to which I have a fair answer. The kindness of November lies in its identity as the month for remembering. Memory is one of the most gentle and healing of God’s gifts to us. Even if we have traumatic memories, psychologists will tell us that they are better brought to the surface to be faced and treated, rather than repressed; yet so many of our memories are comforting in themselves.
“Memories are made of this” sang Perry Como. “At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them,” wrote Lancaster poet Laurence Binyon, words recited by hundreds of thousands of people at Remembrance Day services every year. “Remember, remember the Fifth of November” recalls a perhaps less salubrious aspect of our history, but if we forget the bad elements of our past we are likely to repeat them.
Most importantly, we have today’s Feast of All Saints, followed by tomorrow’s commemoration of the Holy Souls, and the ongoing recollection of the latter throughout the month. What can be kinder than to cherish the memory of those who have gone before us, to rejoice in the saints, to participate by our prayers in the task of purification of those for whom it is still a work in progress?
“You must be perfect” Jesus tells us. “Perfect”, perfectus, complete, thoroughly made—a goal which few if any of us will have reached by the time of our death. As the First Letter of St. John tells us today, we must attempt to purify ourselves as Christ is pure, but that is not something which we can achieve for ourselves. It will be the result of God’s making us to “be like Him”, something which will require a radical change in us. All change is painful: that is what we mean by Purgatory—something so blindingly obvious that I am baffled that anyone can doubt it.
Today, then, let us remember with joy, celebrating the saints both great and small whose transformation into the likeness of God is complete. We are thinking, not only of the canonised saints, but of those who will never be canonised: friends and relations, colleagues, fellow parishioners who, in their different ways, revealed to us more clearly the face of Christ. Then tomorrow, and for the rest of November—indeed, all year round—let us remember prayerfully, positively, confidently, those for whom that journey may yet be incomplete. What could be kinder than that?
