All Saints’ Day: ‘A Cloud of Witnesses’

Today, Nov. 1, is the feast of All Saints’ Day, a day on which to remember that God told us through the Bible that we are surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses over our head” (Heb. 12:1).

From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the Christians prayed to saints not as gods, but as intercessors. All Christians ask others to pray for them, and whom better to ask for prayers than those who stand before the face of God Himself? As St. James wrote in the New Testament (James 5:16), “Confess therefore your sins one to another: and pray one for another, that you may be saved. For the continual prayer of a just man availeth much.” And the Old Testament Book of Tobit recounts how the Archangel Raphael took Tobias’s prayer intentions and presented them to God (Tobit 12:12): “When thou didst pray with tears, and didst bury the dead, and didst leave thy dinner, and hide the dead by day in thy house, and bury them by night, I offered thy prayer to the Lord.”

Many saints are officially canonized, and many more are not. There are martyrs whose names have not been well recorded, and individuals who have gone to Heaven, though their holiness is known only to their loved ones. So Nov. 1 is the feast of All Saints or All Hallows (Halloween was originally a Catholic celebration—the name is a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve).

Below is a short prayer for this feast:

“Dear God, thank you for the example of the Saints.
I desire to join in their company, worshiping you forever in Heaven.
Please help me follow their footsteps, and yours, Jesus Christ.
Please help me to conform myself to Your image, seeking Your will in all things, as the Saints did.
Please help me to devote myself, and all that I do, to Your glory, and to the service of my neighbors.
Amen.”

Have a blessed feast day!

This article was originally published last year.