He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered…He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
All Saints Day reminds us of all those holy men and women whom God, in His infinite mercy, sends us as torches to light our path in a dark world. Filled with God’s love and grace, they make golden the pages of our histories with their lives and witness. Feeling the lure of sin just as much as any of us, they turned to God and reflected His love to us. They come in all sorts of humanity: men and women, all nationalities, wise, simple, warriors, pacifists, miracle workers, saints whose only miracle was their life, humorous, humorless, clergy, laity, old, young, united only in their Faith and their love for the Highest Love.Â
It is too easy as we go about our prosaic lives to forget the Ultimate Reality that the saints clearly see. May we, with them, one day behold that Ultimate Reality in the face, in the Beatific Vision.
