I AM glad that the Church sets aside a feast day for All Saints. I feel the All in All Saints, like the All in All Souls is all inclusive. Alongside the special set days for the named and known saints, the heroes and heroines of the faith, there is a day for all the unknowns, for the clouds of witness, for the “great multitude whom no one can number”.

Perhaps All Saints’ Day also takes us back to the time when St Paul could simply refer to Christians as “the saints”: the saints in Jerusalem, the saints in Ephesus, the saints in North Walsham — not yet saints in splendour, but saints in the making. It’s there in the hymn “For all the Saints”, especially in my favourite lines:

We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine

 
But the ones who now shine in glory are there to encourage us feeble strugglers — not by example alone, which might be oppressive, but by their communion with us, their intercession for us. My wife, Maggie, once told me of an All Saints’ Day sermon that she heard, made especially memorable by its brevity: “There are only two things you need to know about the saints,” the preacher began. “There are lots of them, and they’re all on our side.” That was the beginning and end of the sermon, and a startled organist had to launch into the next hymn before he expected to.

One of those saints now in glory, when he was reflecting on glory itself while still on this side of the river, wrote: “It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. . . It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

That sermon, “The Weight of Glory”, by C. S. Lewis, is full of good things, but not the least is this lifting of the veil, this invitation to glimpse for a moment your neighbour as they will be in glory; and All Saints’ Day is a good day to remember his pithy and startling remark: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisation — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. . .”

And if you are remembering those words whilst in church, then you will likely remember his conclusion: “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

And what if you and that neighbour have both just received that Blessed Sacrament? Why, then, even the feeblest of strugglers is shining in glory!