Homily on the Solemn Feast of All Saints 2019
My dear people of God,
@1 Today, the 1st day of November, we, the people of God of the Roman Catholic extraction, are celebrating the solemn Feast of all Saints
@1a) “All Saints” means all holy human persons that have meanwhile gone to heaven and are now living there irrevocably as in God‟s holy city and dwelling place.
@1b) The company of “All Saints” embraces all who have been totally sanctified, namely conformed to Christ who alone is the Holy One in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father, our Father who is in heaven and whose holy Name is to be held sacred by us and whose Will is to be done by us down here on earth as it is done up there in heaven where the saints are now living with Him and in wait for us.
@2 To celebrate a solemn Feast of a heavenly reality is to administer the truth and receive the grace, the grace and truth with which the glory of the only begotten Son of God is full and that we have seen.
Thus to administer the truth we have seen upon our looking from here below at the holy persons up there in heaven, and at heaven itself as the place in which they are living now with God, is a basic constitutive element of our celebration of the solemn Feast of All Saints.
To administer the truth thereby is to describe the things and persons, and narrate the things, we have seen with our heart and mind as with our two spiritual natural eyes that look at them through the lenses, the wisdom and the understanding that are the two microscopic and telescopic lenses respectively, of that spiritual pair of supernatural spectacles constituted by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit through the named two lenses of which our heart and mind look microscopically and telescopically respectively at these heavenly as supernatural realities.
@3 And on a day like this in which we are celebrating such a solemn Feast like that of All Saints, we are filled with a unique blessedness in which happiness is united with gladness and joy and jubilation, upon our looking heavenwards and seeing supernatural realities, realities embracing persons and things, things embracing objects and events, events embracing actions of persons and occurrences of things - existing and living up there in heaven. And I will embark on describing the holy persons in heaven and heaven itself as I see them in the light of what my patron and mentor, Saint John the Beloved Apostle of the Lord, has seen according to the Book of Revelation.
@4 For already at my very first sight of heaven itself as the immense city of God and holy place where the Saints live with Him, my spirit rejoices in the Lord. And beginning, as in my childhood and boyhood days, with admiration of the heavenly place itself where the Saints are living in the splendour of His glory l intone the song that the Spirit of the Lord gave me to compose and to be sung at the sight of such a holy place: “We have seen already diverse types of beauty; but this one here is unique, it has no comparison, every thing that is beautiful is here or nowhere else. Any beauty that is not here is nowhere else. How wonderful you are O Lord our God. It is lovely to dwell here in your presence”.
@5 But my spirit rejoices more and more the more I turn my look from the place itself to the numerous holy human persons and holy angelic persons and only three but most holy divine
2
persons themselves that are living in heaven and upon my beholding what and how we humans on earth shall be in the hereafter, if we become admitted into the company of the Saints and into the community of God in heaven, we who here on earth, and with His divine assistance ever remaining with us, are now longing to be in their company and community and have also meanwhile begun by His grace to develop and evolve from being children of God to becoming men and women of God, in order hereafter in heaven to be called Saints of God.
@5a) How we shall be: for, God has created us so that here on earth we may know Him, love Him, and serve Him, in order hereafter in heaven we may be in full communion with Him. Such communion embraces first our full communication and full union with Him at the end of our earthly pilgrimage to heaven and then, at the end of the world, our full participation in his divine life as the life of eternal love for one another, eternal joy at one another, eternal glorification of one another and eternal peace for one another going on inside Him among the three persons in Him who have created us in their own image and likeness so that we, being like them, similar to them in view of this communion with them based on what we have in common with them that make us so similar to them.
@5b) We are longing to be in their company and community, and for this we have gone out to meet the Head of this blessed collectiveness, and we move on zealously to Him without looking back but rather with singing to Him while on the way.
@5ba) I first look at the holy human persons in that glorious company and community
@5baa) I focus my eyes thereby first and foremost on the most prominent of them, namely the Blessed Virgin Mary assumed into heaven. How did she get there? The will of God our Heavenly Father, His divine Will, was at the base of this movement of our Mother away from us leaving us in the world like motherless children and even without a word of comfort to us before she left, unlike Christ who comforted us with promises before He ascended into heaven. The Assumption of our Mother as her transfer from the earth here to heaven was an event explicitly desired by Her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who had gone up there ahead of her, through His glorious Ascension, as He who, before leaving this world, had prayed to the Heavenly Father saying “Father I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they always see the glory you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (Jn 17:24). And such people whom the Father has given to the Son and whom the ever generous incarnate Son of the living God wants the Father to allow come from here on earth below to be with Him up there in heaven are numberless, but the list begins rightly with His Mother.
I keep ruminating over what my eyes keep seeing from afar, and that is partly on the singularity of the movement itself and partly on the singularity of Our Mother in motion, moving but moved, for whatever creature is in movement is being moved by some other being - quidquid movet alio movetur. The singularity of her movement with her human body and soul to heaven appears already clear in the mirror of its difference from the movement of only the human soul of the holy thief from the Golgotha mount to paradise, but also becomes clearer in her being carried and in fact by angels. Her singularity appears already clear in her being not only the only one Mother of Christ the Godman that has been made Mother of us Christians on the Cross without ceasing to be the Mother of Christ, like the incarnate Son of God is that Son of God made Son of Man in her holy womb without His ceasing to be Son of God, whereby she, as long as she is the Mother of us Christians, is the Mother of the entire renewed humanity as of the humans that believe in Christ, hence the Mother of the Church as of the unity resulting from the mediated union of Christ with the
3
Christians through the all-uniting and life-giving Holy Spirit, but also in her being the very first human person that God the Father gave to His Son here on earth. But her singularity appears still clearer in her being, and she deserves to be, the first human person to be with Christ there in heaven with the whole of one‟s humanity: soul and spirit and body. For sure, the human spirit of the thief on the Cross went to paradise on Good Friday together with the human spirit of Christ which Christ commended into the hands of His Heavenly Father at the moment of His death, but the thief did not go to paradise with his human body. And our Lord Jesus Christ on His own part resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven with the whole of His humanity - soul and spirit and body. But Jesus Christ was not a human person. Therefore only Mary Assumed into heaven and Crowned in heaven, Maria Assumpta in Caelum et in Caelo Coronata , is the first, and till now the only, human person to go to and to be in heaven with one‟s human body.
@5bab) The other human holy persons in heaven whom I see when from here on earth I look upwards are the martyrs as those Christians who were killed here on earth for the sake of Christ through their standing firm to their belief in Him and in His teachings and message from the Father because of their teaching what they believe and practicing what they teach up to the shedding of their blood by a hater of Christ and hence hater of the Holiness and Justice in Him, their giving thus their life for the victory of God over the Devil, of Goodness over Evil, of Light over Darkness, of Love over hatred, of the Truth over Lies and falsehood, of Life over death, as epitomized in the victory of Christ over all that are in contradiction to Him the Godman as to the only one infallible and indispensable Mediatior between God and humankind and whom we humans of goodwill love and who first gave His own blood also out of love for us on the Cross, for the remission of our sins.
@5bac) The next group of holy human persons in heaven whom I continue to see are those that recapture what all Saints as holy human persons have in common. The Saints of God in heaven are those holy Men and Women of God on earth who did the Will of God as Christ did it while they were living on earth and in whom the Lord has fulfilled the promise He made to whoever did His Will contained in His commands to men.
Thus some of the saints in heaven I see are those who - having conformed their Will to that of God that Man should be poor in spirit, i.e surrender one‟s will to God - willingly accept and do God‟s own as the only infallible and irreprehensible Will and have now been made owners of the kingdom of God by God.
Some others of the Saints in heaven that I see are those who, while they were here on earth, have done God‟s wish that Man should have purity of heart - for Man should not bear grudges nor habour rancour against fellow humans, but should cultivate cleanliness of heart. - and they have now been rewarded up there in heaven with the fulfillment in them of God‟s promise to us of the beatific as ever gladdening, joy-giving. vision of Him. Such a purity of heart must however be, and always remain, united with the purity of the mind. For, Man should not think evil nor think bad of fellow humans, and because the heart and the mind are the two spiritual natural eyes with which the human spirit can see spiritual realities, hence see supernatural realities, thus see God and see heaven. And this union of the purity of heart with the purity of mind has to be effected by the purity of hands. For, Man should neither corrupt others nor be corrupted by others and should be innocent of the downfall, the sorrow or the misery, of fellow humans, and should rather be instrument of their upliftment and joy and glory, and because only those of pure heart, and of innocent hands can climb the mountain of encounter with the Lord to see His face and glory, only such can go up to heaven to see God face to face.
4
Yet another group of the Saints of God in heaven that I see is that of those who, having done, while here on earth, the Will of God that Man should be a peacemaker, have now been called sons and daughters of God in heaven.
@5bb) While on the way I keep singing to the Head of the great Company and Community to which I long to belong and hence by singing another verse of that same first song: “Nearer, nearer, our Lord and God, we are coming to You! Stronger and stronger our faith in You, deeper and deeper our love for You, higher and higher, joyous and joyous, our hope on You, wider and wider, clearer and clearer our knowledge of You, the longer and longer we move to You who are waiting for us!”
@6. Finally I focused my eyes on the three Most Holy of the persons in heaven, the three divine persons in heaven whom I admire with the deepest affection and devotion and with the highest honor and praise.
@6a) I thereby engage, as since my adulthood, in admiring the mysterious and paradoxical, yes at once inviting splendid and fascinating and yet scaring, dazzling, directly inaccessible, inscrutable and tremendous face of God and in managing to Intuit and visualize the otherwise fathomless and inexplicable interior of God (Deus) as of the First and the Last living Reality.
@6b) I keep admiring the Deity as the containing component of God as Reality, while I am admiring the Divine Trinity as His contained component, whereby I meditate also on those conditions only through the fulfillment of which the union of the container and the content is effected. For I meditate on the eternally fulfilled conditions for the Deity (the one and indivisible Godhead) to contain the divine Trinity adequately and for the divine Trinity to be received by the Deity adequately, since whatever is received must be received according to the mode of the Receiver for the reception to be adequate.
@6c) Hence I delight in meditating on how the trinitarian structure of the numerically one God exists out of the intertwining relationship among the three persons in one God, namely the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And it belongs to my sacred delight to ponder on how the intertwining relationship among the three persons in one God exists in turn from the order of originations within the Deity, namely how the Father has no origin, whereas the Son originates from only God the Father, while the Holy Spirit originates from the Father and the Son together by proceeding from both at the same time.
And all the time I keep admiring the inseparability of the three - the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit - from one another, and I admire their staying together and acting together all the time and always doing the same thing as, and with, one another but without any of them doing it in the same way as any of the rest two is doing it. but rather each is doing it in way that is diverse from, or contrary, i. e. opposite but not opposed, to how any of the rest two does it, I admire them and take delight in looking at how they always (semper) do the same thing (idem) as each does but doing (facientes) it diversely (aliter) from one another (semper idem sed allter facientes).
I keep meditating on how the Son originates eternally from God the Father through being generated from the substance of God by God the Father Himself as Light, namely how God as Light generates His Son by casting His luminous rays on Himself, on His innermost Self, on His very Substance, only to generate an image of His Substance, whereby this image of the Substance of God, this substantial Image of God is far from being a shadow, since a shadow is a being without substance, whereas this image of the Substance of God has a substance, and in fact a substance that
5
is neither different from, nor similar to nor another than, but rather identical with the one and same and indivisible substance of God the Father, an image of God the Father that, because it is not a thing but rather a person, is thus called the Son of God, and, because it is an eternal Person, is called a divine Person and, hence, God.
And I reflect on how the Holy Spirit originates from the Father and Son together by His proceeding from both at the same time through His being that most pure and vitally indispensable and, hence, sacrosanct Air itself in person whom the Father and the Son must eternally respire, inhaling Him in from one another and exhaling Him out to one another at the same time, breathing Him in from one another and breathing Him out to one another contemporaneously for them to be living Beings. And such Air itself in person is called Spiritus in so far as He is a breathed being, „ens spiratum‟, whereby the adjective „spiratus, spirata, spiratum‟ comes from the latin verb „spiro, spirare, spiravi, spiratum‟, meaning „to breathe‟, wherefore „to respire‟ („respiro, respirare, respiravi, respiratum‟) means to breathe in and breathe out (inhalare et exhalare), and thus „the respired being‟ (ens respiratum) is the inhaled and exhaled being (ens inhalatum atque exhalatum)‟
And this Spiritus who is eternally breathed in from, and out to, one another by the Father and the Son and is vitally indispensable and therefore as almighty and sacrosanct as He is most pure Air itself in person , is rightly called the Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Spirit. And as long as this Spiritus Sanctus as the Air itself in person that the Father and Son eternally take from, and give to, one another is eternal and almighty He is a divine person. and hence God.
And I keep admiring how the Father contemporaneously breathes Him in from, and breathes Him out to, the Son at the same time that the Son is contemporaneously breathing the same one and indivisible vivifying Air in from the Father and breathing Him out to the Father, with the consequence that i) there is no interval in space nor in time between the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father to the Son and His procession from the Son to the Father Son, and thus the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father and the Son together and contemporaneously (ex Patre Filioque procedit; cf. egressus usque ad exitum), ii) similarly there is no interval in space nor in time between the returning of the Holy Spirit from the Father to the Son and His returning from the Son to the Father, and thus the Holy Spirit is said to return to the Father and the Son together and contemporaneously (ad Patrem Filiumque recedit, cf. regressus usque ad reditum).
@7 May each one of us from our active participation in the Celebration of the Feast of All Saints every year receive also from God through their intercession the grace of becoming one of them hereafter in heaven!
By
Rev. Prof. J. Egbulefu CCE