Your Church throughout the world, O Lord, is clothed with the blood of Your Martyrs as with fine linens and purple robes; and so the Church cries out to You, O Christ our God: “Send down Your goodness upon Your people; grant peace to Your Church and great mercy to our souls.”

On the first weekend after the feast of Pentecost, our Church celebrates and commemorates all the saints of the Church. It is the eighth weekend after Easter. We pay particular veneration to all those who are the fruit of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Our Holy Fathers instituted this feast and directed it to be kept after the feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, as if to set before us an example of how the coming of the all-Holy Spirit enabled them to attain sanctity. He made holy and all wise those who were of the same nature as we so that we might realize that it is within our power to live like Jesus lived.

Because we all share in God’s life, which is present within us through the power of His Spirit, we all can become saints. It is a matter of becoming more fully aware of God’s Spirit within us. He is not absent from us! It is we who are not aware of His presence within us. A real part of life’s journey is coming to an awareness of God’s life and Spirit within us. The process of becoming more aware of the fact that the life-force within us is intimately connected to God’s own life-force, can lead us to a deeper awareness of God’s Spirit within us. The saints that we remember on this   feast are not saints because they somehow achieved perfection. They are saints because they became more deeply aware of God’s life and Spirit within them and drew upon His power to live like Jesus lived.

If you think about this you will immediately become aware of the fact that to achieve this goal of greater awareness, a person must (1) desire to became more aware of this fact; (2) believe that life is a sharing in God’s own life; and (3) engage in actions that can built this awareness. This, of course, means that a person becomes serious about their faith and decides that it is in their best interest to come to a deeper understanding of God’s life and Spirit within them.

One of the interesting things about life is that we all believe in certain things. The problem is, often they are the wrong things in which to believe.