Editorial: Death, Resurrection, happiness

When will we realise that as the the Church, we exist inside and outside of time and have comrades who have gone before, who are ready to help us.
It is impossible to let two such wonderful and deeply inspiring occasions as the Feasts of All Saints (November 1) and All Souls (November 2) pass without comment, for they are such beautiful and encouraging moments in the year of the Church.
These two days, which are something like a double-barrelled occasion of joy for all members of the Church, inspire us because they confirm and re-confirm the most essential truth of Christianity and the Catholic Church – that death is not the end of existence as it was once supposed and has been conquered forever by Christ’s victory upon the Cross and His Resurrection. Beyond death there is no uncertainty, no cold and infinite universe lacking meaning, no extinction of self in a greater reality or nothingness, but instead a loving Father who wants us to be with Him, free. Forever.
Both events also reiterate a simple and profound secondary truth, that Christianity is not irrelevant to modern life but completely relevant, a message not to be heard from any of the usual authorities to whom our society and culture turn for ultimate moral guidance: government pronouncements, nightly news bulletins, radio talkback shows, movies, witty television talkshow comperes or any other of the vast array of media that ceaselessly bombards us with (mainly) mediocrity 24 hours a day. In all these things, it seems, everyone is constantly talking, but almost no-one is actually saying anything.
In the shadow of this modern and sometimes seemingly-pervasive culture of dismissal (and often ridicule) of religious belief, it can take some courage to cling to concepts that seem so quaint, so redolent of unfashionable things, so apparently out of step or irrelevant to everyone around us. Living in the midst of a culture that has so quickly and substantially rejected God within the space of a few generations, it becomes apparent that the Christian vocation is not only a vocation of love, but a vocation that both requires, and bestows, courage. Therefore, in the face of living the difficulty and isolation of the Christian vocation in such an often-empty and shallow nation as Australia, what is the contemporary Christian to do?
One important and joy-filled part of the answer, which is always Christ, the Word of God and His Church, is to turn to the saints.
So many of our contemporaries fear death as the ultimate end, and spend their lives trying to escape it through things such as possessions, power, importance, money, drugs and so on; the list is almost endless.
The Saints already in heaven and those now bound for it, but not yet arrived, teach us that none of the things our society values most offer true happiness. The Saints and the Holy Souls reconfirm, instead, that we are not ordinary, but are immortals. They reaffirm, yet again, that the ways in which we often see ourselves and our lives are so far adrift of the truth as to be practically beyond satire: in fact, all the baptised are, in reality, sons and daughters of God.
They teach us that death is not extinction, but merely a step through a doorway into that far-off country that is our true home. They teach us that heaven is real. They show us the possibility of our lives. They show us that the mediocrity lived so often among our contemporaries and believed by them to be normality is in reality an abnormality and a suffocation of our true vocation, to be free. Forever. And so they teach us not to settle for that mediocrity surrounding us.
They teach us, also, that intimate friendship with God, which we also call holiness, is the normal state of being a Christian in this life. And this, in turn, shows us that we can, and should, aim high and not settle for ‘good enough’ in our relationship with the one who created us for Himself. In reality, the Saints and the Holy Souls show us that sainthood is not just something for priests and religious (and only a few of them at that) but is what is expected of all of us – now.
In a very real sense the saints and the Holy Souls teach us a dangerous and subversive truth (dangerous and subversive for our society, and even for many within the Church) because they show us what could be, if only we are willing to cast off the shackles of conventionality and no longer live our Christianity as a pale imitation of a real faith. Against those, some of whom hold office in the Church, who appear to believe that Christianity is merely about ‘niceness’ and not disagreeing too strongly with someone else, the Saints and the Holy Souls stand as shining examples of a faith that is alive, courageous, visionary and audacious.
We, for our part, can pray for their intentions and seek to imitate the examples of both the officially canonised and the vaster number of uncanonisable and unknown Saints already in heaven. We can ask them to pray for us. As one Anglican writer said some years ago, to belong to the Church of Christ is to belong to the only institution in the world that exists simultaneously in time – and out of it. Therefore, to fall within the sheepfold of Christ is to be able to draw in an instant on nothing less than the power of heaven.
For the Holy Souls we should never stop praying. Last month this paper urged all its readers to pray the Rosary in the month usually known as the Month of the Rosary. This month we dare to ask our readers to pray seriously for the Holy Souls in Purgatory  – for their release into heaven, for their intentions and their intercession. They will in turn, you may rely upon it, return the favour.
The Catholic Church is a paradox – a Church for sinners and a Church for Saints. We are, it is true, all sinners. But the Saints show us what is possible for our own lives and what we are meant to be. They show us that we are called to walk the same shining path they trod themselves. With faith in God and the help of God we can do this. In them, we see the difference between mediocrity and true Faith.