by Robert Hendrickson

In just a week we mark All Souls’. It’s the day we set aside to pray for the departed and to ask for their prayers for us as well.

The day before that, we observe All Saints’ Day.

There’s an unfortunate tendency in some circles these days to conflate All Saints and All Souls. This takes one of the triumphant feasts of the church year, All Saints, and turns it into a funeral.

The great joy of All Saints’ is that it is not a funeral. It is a celebration of the heroic faith of those who were convinced of the love of God — and the promise of eternal life — and who lived their lives as a whole and holy testimony to that promise.

But were the Saints’ lives one long unbridled act of heroic valor?

More likely, a Saint’s life was one of pious drudgery. It’s not like Saint George was constantly and consistently and unceasingly fighting one long battle against dragon after dragon. He had to do other stuff. He had to put grease on the hinges of his armor so it wouldn’t seize up. He had to clean his horse’s hooves. Probably clean up after the horse, too. He had to oil the saddle. He had to get groceries. He had to pay the bills. I don’t know how taxes worked then, but I don’t expect he had a CPA.

The Saints lived in such a way that each step they took was offered to God somehow or in some way, so that their lives became a living testimony to the truth of the Gospel.

This is what is truly at the heart of sainthood — the will to persevere. It’s not a will of our own making, but a will shaped and forged by the patient work of prayer, service, and sacraments. It’s the work of letting our will and our hope be made in the shape of Christ’s own. It’s the work of living well and then being forgotten.

At some great, cataclysmic moment, you may be called to an iconic, literal kind of sainthood.

But it is more likely that it is in the gentle living of our opulently average lives that we will find ourselves, having first lost ourselves for love’s sake.

It is in that very averageness that sainthood is truly made and in those pedestrian choices that we come to run the race, all the way to the end and beyond, as disciples.

The Rev. Robert Hendrickson is Chief of Discipleship Initiatives at Forward Movement, and a member of the Cedar team.