Today we in the Catholic faith celebrate All Saints Day, followed by All Souls’ Day tomorrow. I’ve always been impacted by the two celebrations being on consecutive days. It almost provides a “weekend”, if you will, for us pastoral musicians to sit with our communities in renewed ways. Calling upon the saints on All Saints Day seems so immense and powerful, to me, it almost felt intimidating. Saints have always been this powerful presence in my Catholic faith that I can only hope to aspire to. I visualize them with those golden translucent halos that they’re so often depicted with. They seem to have a holiness that I’ll never reach.

And then the next day we celebrate All Souls’ Day. All Souls’ Day was always a day in my community where we invited all of the loved ones of those who passed away in the last year, to join us for a night of community and prayer, i.e. All Souls’ Day Mass. It always had this sense of, a spiritual homecoming, if you will, as I saw the faces of so many from throughout the year. They were there to find solace, to find comfort, and to find hope in the resurrection as we all believe. The holiness in the church seem to envelop me each year.

The celebrations of All Saints and All Souls Day bring about conversations of holiness: holiness in those we believe to be saints in the faith, as well as the holiness we find among ourselves each day. How can we better recognize this holiness in others, and in ourselves? I called Brother Louis Canter from the Diocese of Lakeland, Florida to talk about this exact topic.