This Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints. Happy feast!

I love this part of our faith tradition that holds a special place of honor for our holy people and recognizes their closeness with God and their surviving and thriving in the faith. The practice of praying with saints reminds us that life continues after death and that we are all connected in the Body of Christ. We are never alone in our struggle; not only do we have each other, our community here and now, but we have all those throughout time who have lived and prayed and persevered.

As I reflect on the feast this year, it occurs to me that our saints are kind of like holy mentors. I’ve had mentoring on my mind since last week when I did a program with Giving Voice, a national organization for sisters under fifty-years-old. The workshop was a “Diversity & Inclusion Encuentro” which emphasized the importance of mentoring. In many ways, religious life is set up to encourage mentoring. Because of its intergenerationality, there are lots of opportunities for sisters to mentor each other. There’s a kind of forced mentoring for newer members (which is sometimes helpful and sometimes not), and then there’s the way that mentoring relationships naturally emerge because of shared interests and compatible personalities. These relationships continue to impact us even after sisters have died. We often tell stories about the sisters we knew and loved, which helps newer members, who never met them, to know and love them too. We also have a practice of reading the necrology when we pray together. It’s a list of all our sisters who have died on each day of the year. Reading their names is a way of remembering them and connecting with our sisters across time and place. Some of us, especially when we’re in need, walk through our cemetery and pray with the sisters who have gone before us, asking for their guidance and their prayers. The sisters who lived in the 1700s until now are still with us. We’re rooted in a legacy of sister saints, surrounded by holy mentors.

You don’t have to be a nun to be part of a holy legacy, though; all of us have access to relationships with saints. Maybe some of your saints are canonized ones, and maybe some are holy mentors you’ve known – grandmas, teachers, ministers. If you reflect over your life, you might see, like I do, that we’re just not meant to do life alone. We’re a communal faith that has long believed that it takes a village to raise a child of God. In fact, from our very beginnings, we were in this together. I think we had to be. Not long after Christianity began, we were thrown into persecution. We see remnants of that in our reading from Revelation. If you’ve spent any time with this book of the Bible, you know that to read it at face value is super weird. It helps to understand that it’s written in code to comfort suffering people and to encourage them to persist despite oppression. In this passage, we meet a group of people dressed in white robes. Who are they? “‘These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress . . .’” They’re models in the faith, people who have persevered in holiness and now give hope to those still in the throes of persecution.

The hope offered by these holy ones is not only for the early church, though; we can draw comfort from them too. If this pandemic is not a time of great distress, I don’t know what is. We may not need a strange, coded text to get us through, but I do believe we need each other. Who are the holy ones, both living and deceased, who can mentor us through our time of suffering? And who needs us to reach out and carry them a little as they struggle?

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and we are a great cloud of witnesses. Our people have been here before. Maybe not a pandemic, but we the Body of Christ have had plenty of strife. So, let’s lean on the saints, both living and with God, to persevere through our times of great distress.

By Sister Leslie Keener, CDP

Sister Leslie Keener, CDP is the director of God Space, a community-building spirituality ministry in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. She’s a Sister of Divine Providence with a Masters in Ministry and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Retreats from Creighton University. She directs retreats, meets with people for spiritual direction, and serves as the vocation director for her community. She also serves on the Coordinating Council of Spiritual Directors International. She enjoys music, dancing, and meaningful conversations.