1 November: All Saints! All of them, canonized, uncanonized, will be canonized, will never be canonized: all of them. It’s their day.

Are they distant? No, they are right here, probably like Thérèse, spending their heaven doing good on earth.

But do they seem distant? I think they can. If so, it could be because we’re just not used to being with them. They are with God more fully than we are. So the barrier would largely be that we’re not as fully with God as we could be. Of course, they are in Heaven. We aren’t. We will not be in the Church of Heaven in this life. That’s for the next life. But the Church of Heaven comes down to earth every minute of every day. After all, heaven is God, and God dwells in the souls of the just.

But none of that changes how distant the Church of Heaven can seem. In Christ, we must conquer our inadequacies. We can call this passing through the “dark night”; we can call this “changing suffering into joy”; we can call this many things. But, the battle won, Heaven will seem nearer. Even with some skirmishes won, Heaven will seem nearer.

Freed up, liberated from the things that are pulling us down to goals that are less than our Homeland in God, we will even have “conversation in Heaven”. Taking a cue that must be more obvious in Latin, those are the words Saint John of Ávila and Saint Edith Stein give to this story; here is Edith’s version:

Now it is clear that it was a happy fortune for the soul to complete such a difficult task: she has freed herself from the devil, from the world, and from her own sensuality, has won the precious freedom of the spirit, has been transformed from an earthly to a heavenly soul and has arrived at having her conversation in Heaven (Phil 3:20).

In fact, most translations of Saint Paul seem to say, in modern English, “citizenship”, not “conversation”. But only on a nominalist or libertarian account would we actively separate “citizenship” from “conversation”. Surely, except in cases of emigration, one converses where one is civilized!

Let us have conversation in heaven… a prayer, a destination, a way of progress.