All Saints Day

November 1st. All Saints Day. A cool holiday! A lot of people don't know what it means, though. So here I am, to explain the official Catholic explanation.

As we know, all the folks up in heaven right now are basically Saints. As a human soul, if you get into Heaven before the Day of Judgment, then you're automatically a Saint by definition. Your high-profile Saints, they may have been declared and recognized as such, but that official recognition isn't what makes them a Saint! They're Saints just by virtue of the fact that their blameless lives of virtue allowed them to go straight to Heaven when they died. All the other souls are either sleeping it off until the Second Coming, or else they're cooling their heels in Purgatory, atoning for their sins; or else they went to The Other Place (that would be Hell). There used to be another Other Place called Limbo, but it proved politically unpopular and it was eventually shut down when funding was cut off.

Now, a lot of your poster-boy, poster-girl "declared" Saints, they have feast days of their own, days specifically set aside for their veneration, to celebrate their saintliness. All Saints Day is for everybody else. The Common Saint; St. Joe Average, if you will. All Saints Day celebrates those Saints whose blameless lives may not necessarily have caught the eye of the Saint-Verification Squad, perhaps due to the excessive meekness and simplicity of their nonetheless saintly lives.

Now what happens on All Saints Day is, any prayers being offered up today, instead of being routed through the usual patron Saint for whatever the problem is, every incoming prayer is declared "up for grabs." The established luminaries sort of take a step back, and let the no-name up-and-comers scramble to fill the gap, to step it up, to take their game to the next level. It's a real annual event up there in Heaven! They're planning and organizing weeks ahead of time, there are banners and scorecards and celebration rituals and all that. Last year's winner, St. Ornistheus (a Cypriot who died in 1191 - first-time winner, a real dark horse and a great human-interest story) was put in charge of Incoming Prayer Distribution and declared the unofficial Patron Saint of Receptionists. An important post!

Who will be the big story this year? We'll just have to wait to find out. It's all up in the air at this point.