This weekend (October 25-27, 2024) is our 35th Harvest Festival. For the past years, it has become a way of gathering our community from all walks of life and all ages. Days to nurture and deepen our relationships as we celebrate the giftedness of each other’s presence. These are days to create memories that can be added to our stories as onefamily of God.
This coming November 1st, we also celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints, which is a Holy Day of Obligation instituted to honor all of the saints, both known and unknown, and according to Pope Urban IV, to supply any deficiencies in the faithful’s celebration of saints’ feasts during the year.
I would like to think that celebrating All Saints Day is also a Harvest Festival. It is the great harvest of the seeds that fell on the fertile ground that dried up, went through a certain death but in the process has grown and borne much fruit,yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.(Matthew 13:23) As the Psalmist has it, “The earth has yielded its harvest; God our God blesses us.” (Psalm 67:7)
Just a quick look in the celebrations of this Solemnity in the early Church. The faithful would gather to solemnize the anniversary of a martyr’s death for Christ at the place of martyrdom. Some groups of martyrs suffered on the same day which eventually led to a joint commemoration. During the years of Christian persecutions, the number of martyrs became so numerous and that assigning a day for each could not be possible and this led to appoint a common day for all which was mentioned in the sermon of Saint Ephremthe Syrian (373) and in the 74th homily of Saint John Chrysostom (407). In the year 609 (610) Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon in Rome to the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the martyrs, ordering an anniversary. Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of Saint Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for November 1st. Pope Gregory IV eventually extended the celebration to the entire Catholic Church.
This beautiful tradition we have reminds us that saints are real, historical figures who were, like us, ordinary people made extraordinary by the grace of God. In celebrating this Solemnity, we are harvesting the fruits of their faith, and in the same way, we pay our respect to the action of God’s grace in their lives. This Solemnity gives us comfort that we are not alone and that we are surrounded by a great cloud of God’s witnesses invisibly accompanying us, firmly established for us, interceding for us.
Edith Stein, a German Philosopher turned Carmelite nun anda martyr beautifully presented this: “the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when everything that’s hidden will be revealed.”