Saints or Soldiers?
Yesterday was The Feast of All Saints–one of the most underrated and largely unknown holy days in the Catholic Church–that has been overshadowed by a culturally meaningless and increasingly grotesque version of the vigil celebration of All Saints Day: Halloween (All Hallows Eve).
All Saints Day is a holy day that celebrates those who made it to their destination of heavenly bliss.
But how does this feast day relate to us, who are still living? We are, in essence, celebrating the ordinary (canonized and uncanonized) Soldiers of Christ who have gone before us–the ones who fought for the truth.
Many are the unsung heroes who now constantly pray for us still struggling here.
We celebrate them because they are our brothers and sisters fully alive, in and with Christ. They are the “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1), who cheer us on in our battle against evil.
Their prayers help us to desire not worthless things (Ps 24:4), but to desire something more–an eternity of love.
As Catholic Christians, we know nothing can separate us from our loved ones, not even death.
Why, then, are saints regarded as soldiers? Don’t soldiers crave violence, acting blindly on orders from on high?
In a word, yes.
The battle
For saints to be equivalent to soldiers, there must be a war. But isn’t violence inherently “bad”?
Not if the enemies are fear, sin and demons.
The saints in heaven are ordinary folks who decidedly entered the fray of the supernatural and invisible battle for souls that rages all around us.
They did this by committing violence against themselves, not against others, because evil always presents itself as good in its deception and its alluring false promises (temptations).
The saints knew this, which is why they went to great lengths to avoid it.
For example, St. Benedict (480-547 AD) threw himself into a thorn bush naked to avoid lustful thoughts. St. Thomas Aquinas’ (1225-1274) family sent a prostitute to his room to dissuade him from becoming a Dominican priest. He took a firebrand from the fireplace and chased her from the room.
The defense
St. Paul described the Christian soldier’s best weapons of defense and how to employ them in battle, likening them to “armor”: One’s loins (the lower abdomen and pelvis–the most sensitive and vulnerable region of the body) must be “girded in truth,” and the chest area must be protected with the “breastplate of righteousness” (or spiritual oneness with God), and the feet must be protected with the readiness to live the Gospel of Christ.
One must also employ protection from the shield of faith to block the “flaming arrows of the Evil One” (the Devil), don the helmet of salvation (the supernatural hope of heaven), and finally, hold tightly to the “sword of the [Holy] Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph 6:11-17).
He also said anything that doesn’t bring us closer to Christ is worthless in the fight against evil (Ph 3:8).
Enemies under our feet
St. Ambrose (340-397 AD) knew well what was at stake and why all Christians are called to battle. He said, “The law of our fallen nature is at war with the law of our reason and subjects the law of reason to the law of error.”
Jesus destroyed the last enemy–death–by making it the remedy for our fight against fear, sin and demons.
When we train for battle with Christ, just like the saints before us, we can put our enemies under our feet.
Today, on The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day), we pray for the repose of the souls of our loved ones who have died.
