Our call to holiness

All Saints / All Souls

With All Saints on Sunday this year, it’s the perfect opportunity to highlight today and tomorrow’s Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed with even more solemnity than usual.

First, read or reread Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate” on the call to holiness in today’s world. Look especially at chapter 3, which focuses on the Beatitudes. Connect Francis’s suggestion to look for “holiness found in our next-door neighbors” (7) with an invitation for people to get to know their neighbors better, those living next door and those sitting around them in the pews.

Make a big deal of people’s saint names; invite them to bring images or holy cards of their own saints. Have them carried in the entrance procession, blessed during the Mass, or placed on display for the week at an altar of the saints.

Invite those in your community who celebrate Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) to share the Mexican custom of creating altares or ofrendas, elaborate displays of photos, flowers, and food in remembrance of deceased loved ones. Together with them, build a parish ofrenda in the parish hall or by the baptismal font. At evening prayer Sunday night and at Mass on All Souls Day, invite people to bring photos of their beloved dead to place on the ofrenda for the month of November.

This post was first published in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal.”

Image credit: Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash.