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Catholic Saints
Remembering the Dead and Celebrating the Saints
00:30:14
Dr. Tim Gray and Dr. Elizabeth Klein, professor of Theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School, discuss the importance of remembering the dead in purgatory, celebrating the Saints in heaven, and the Catholic perspective on Halloween.
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Tim Gray
This episode is brought to you by.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
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Tim Gray
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Emergency assistance, education, mental health support and.
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Tim Gray
More to millions each year. Get to know their work, visit jrsusa.org.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Agustin.
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Tim Gray
Welcome to Form. Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute and Joining me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein. And we're going to talk. This weekend is going to be Halloween. All Souls, All Saints. So these two great festivals and of course the world has really spun off from what the church does in praying for All Souls. And you have all these great Halloween, All Hallows Eve is what it's supposed to be, Halloween, as we call it now. And so we're going to talk about this weekend and the meaning of these two great celebrations, these solemnity of All Saints and All Souls and what that means. And let's just talk about Halloween because that's how people enter into it. Of course, Halloween has become such a great commercial holiday. All the stores love to have Halloween decorations. They love to sell Halloween candy. So it's a major commercial enterprise and everyone gets spun up and you get all these costumes. And of course I remember as a kid growing up that after the Star wars movie, so that kind of shows you how old I am, the original Star Wars. And my favorite Halloween was that Star wars where I was Luke Skywalker. I had a lightsaber, but my sister was Princess Leia, my younger sister and my younger brother was R2D2. My mom made this incredible, she would make costumes for us. She was amazing. Our mom spoiled us and she would make these handmade costumes. And my brother was R2D2 and won all these awards for school and all these things for best costume because they got this big cylinder, cardboard cylinder, and she had tin foil over the top with mesh wiring so he looked like R2D2. And it was pretty intricate. And so I remember that event. But I remember, you know, and I don't know if you grew up in Canada, so I don't know. Did you do those crazy costumes?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
We don't do that in Canada. No, we do costumes in Canada. And something about Halloween, like I think some Christians or even Catholics are a little leery. Is Halloween really a Catholic holiday? Has it been too co. Opted? But something that's interesting to me about Halloween and about our relationship to Halloween as Catholics is that it is kind of morbid. And Catholics are often accused of being morbid. You know, we put bones in churches, we venerate them, the relics of the saints and relics of the saints. That actual gruesome element of Halloween really does tie to All Saints because we often honor the martyrs and think about the sufferings that they had. And so this opportunity to really talk about death, face death, think about those who have gone before us and how they've died is actually very Catholic, even though there are obviously parts of Halloween, like candy, that don't exactly tie in. But.
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Tim Gray
No, that's so true. You know, it was interesting because a lot of us at the Augustine Institute, you know, early on, some of the faculty and some of the staff, like Ted Sree and myself, we got our families together and we're like, okay, we don't want to do Halloween. Like the world does Halloween for our kids. Even though I grew up and did those fun costumes and loved collecting candy, but we wanted to do something a little bit different for our kids, so we always made it. We focused on all saints. And so for Halloween, all of our kids would dress for a period of time, we'd have a big gathering with saints costumes. Right. So they would dress up as one of the saints.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And they can be just as gruesome as any Halloween.
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Tim Gray
And they can with the martyrs. I mean, we could outdo gruesome.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. Lucy with the eyes or, you know, people.
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Tim Gray
Yes, that was a favorite. There was some crazy costumes and it was a lot of fun. And what we would do is we'd all get together as our families with these saints costumes, and then they would go out and do trick or treat, but they'd be saints. And so it was kind of like evangelizing. Like, who are you? You know, I'm St. Lucy or I'm St. Francis of Assisi.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And I mean, there's so many saints. It's actually an opportunity to get to know some of the saints. So my son this year wanted to be a knight. And I'm like, well, you're in luck, because there are a lot of saints who are also knights. So he's planning to go as St. Michael the Archangel.
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Tim Gray
St. Michael, that's a good name.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
The knight Angel.
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Tim Gray
I remember our son did St. George, you know, one year, so the dragon slayer. So, yeah, there's some great things and there's ways in which, you know, it's funny, you know, in some ways, the world has kind of co opted some of our celebrations and some of our things, but we can co opt it back. Right. We could push these things back. And that's what we did with a lot of our families with dressing as saints.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. And it was a great opportunity. I didn't even think about. He would get really excited about now, St. Michael and that he's a battle angel. And what does he do? And he has a light sword. He doesn't know the word lightsaber, so he thinks that he has a flaming sword. And so actually, it's been a lot of fun to talk to him about St. Michael and him to get excited about that costume. So I'm looking forward to it.
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Tim Gray
Yeah. See, I think this is a great way for families to kind of, you know, Christians, we don't have to always be afraid of the world and just panic at how they take things, but we can kind of preempt it. You know, we can use this, how the world gets all up about Halloween and really recapture for Christ, for our kids and make it a moment where they can experience the lives of the saints, experience these kinds of stories in community. And so we kind of came together to do that, and I think it's an exciting thing. But let's. Let's talk about All Hallows Eve and what is All Souls and why did the world, you know, take it into Halloween? And, you know, we're gonna see on TV and all the streaming, all the, you know, the undead and, you know, the. All these, you know, zombie movies and things.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
You know, it is interesting. I mean, it's not. It is a great time to talk about death, and it is a good time. It seems to have time. People are open to thinking about that kind of thing. But what's so interesting about All Souls, All Saints is that it's one of really the surest signs of our hope in the resurrection. It's one of our surest signs of the hope of heaven. Because we actually think you can talk to dead people. We actually think that you can pray to the saints and have a relationship with the saints, that you can think about your loved ones who've gone past and pray for them. And when we do that, we really show in a concrete way our belief in the life everlasting.
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Tim Gray
I like that we do dead better than they do, than the world does. You can talk to dead people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
We have the best.
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Tim Gray
I love that. You're making me think of that movie. What was it called? He doesn't realize he's talking to dead people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Oh, the Sixth Sense.
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Tim Gray
Yeah, the Sixth sense. Yeah. But we do talk to dead people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, we do.
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Tim Gray
We do at Ivory liturgy and whenever we're praying to the saints, you pray to St. John Paul II. We just had his feast a couple weeks ago. And, you know, and I always pray to St. John Paul II for our mission here at the Augusta Institute. So we do talk to dead people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And we think about the communion of the saints as being kind of like a really Catholic thing. But, I mean, it's in the creed, right, which is shared by many Christians, not all Christians, but shared by many Christians. And so I do think it's an opportunity to represent it, because a lot of, you know, Protestants may be scared of the saints, but when you present it as well, you ask holy people on earth to pray for you. So why wouldn't you ask holy people in heaven? When we really believe they're there, we really believe they're in the presence of God, why wouldn't you ask them to pray for you? And I think that that's, you know, this whole season can be an entry point into helping people experience the beauty of the lives of the saints.
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Tim Gray
That is powerful. And I think of as we get into November, November is the month where the church typically prays for the dead. And so it's a time for praying for those who are in purgatory, for the souls who have deceased, and they're not fully in God's presence purified yet, but they have to go through this purgation. And so we pray for those souls, and so we can help them. And it's an amazing thing. You know, God doesn't have to do it this way. He could do everything himself. But he called the twelve apostles. I mean, even during, when Jesus is on earth, he still used people to mediate his work. And so he still does that in heaven, I guess, as part of the thing.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. Thomas Aquinas has a wonderful analogy for how this works, which is that, you know, if you're the master of a workshop, there's almost no greater compliment to you than that someone would want to go to your apprentice, that you had trained them so well that they can now carry on your work, and so that it's pleasing to the master to have well trained apprentices. And so this is sort of an image for, I guess, you know, the workshop of the Lord where he really, I mean, that's the goal of creation, right? That we'll share in God's life. And so he wants us to share in his life, and he wants to show off his masterpieces, his saints. And so I love that analogy of Thomas Aquinas.
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Tim Gray
That is a great analogy. I love it. Well, let's go back to this idea of all souls and the point, liturgically, why do we celebrate all Souls. What's the church as a good mother trying to do for the family of God and for us? Why should we remember the dead?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Well, we can help the dead with our prayers. I think it's also instructive for us, you know, when we spend that time every year thinking about those who have gone past, thinking about the beauty of their life, maybe also considering some of their failings and praying for their healing. That helps us also to think of our own end of life, too, and think about, what are my failings? What do I need to purify before that time? And it really does open up this communion to help us understand the afterlife is real, the church is real, and think about where we're headed and where we've come from.
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Tim Gray
I know in our home, as our son Joseph was growing up, it's hard to believe. Joseph's 21 and about to graduate from college here at the end of the semester. But when my wife's parents passed away, first it was her mom, Joanne, and then her father, Matt, later on, a few years later. But we would always. She would bring a picture of them that we'd put out on the. You know, on the island in our kitchen. And we remember to pray for them during the month of November and on All Souls. And I think that what's the beautiful thing about the Catholic liturgy is, the Catholic liturgy is this organic, very familial, natural way of teaching our children and ourselves the importance of our faith. And so, you know, the fact that we're praying for Grandma and Grandpa Ludwig, you know, during that time, that tells our son, okay, you can pray. This is charity, like you said, this is charity for the dead. We can pray for them and help them, and that's a beautiful thing. And it shows that we still love them, we keep them in our hearts, we remember them. And it's a beautiful, beautiful act of charity. And it gets us to this family of God, which is the church. And it's a beautiful family to think about, you know, that we're going to remember our aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and mothers and fathers and maybe brothers and sisters who have passed away before us. We remember them, we love them, and we pray to God for them. And that's a beautiful thing. And it's so natural, isn't it?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. And this is. It's very similar to the All Saints, all souls being tied like this and sort of helping us realize that the church is a family. I mean, one of my favorite things about All Saints is the litany of the saints and just that the listing of the saints, you know, before we had pictures of the dead that we could array to think about being in a church and hearing all those holy names and thinking that those are people who are part of your family, those are people who are praying for you. And you know, you hear. It's like you hear your favorite saint, you know, it's like this lining up of them. It reminds me too, of Old Testament passages where you have these genealogies laid out. And we think now as modern, it's like kind of boring to read them. But if you compare that to something like a litany, where you're hearing, those are your ancestors, that's your family and you recognize. Oh yeah, I know that saint. Oh, this saint is special to me. I'm named after this saint. It really is this beautiful experience of the church as a family. The sort of the church militant here on earth, the church in purgatory, the church suffering and the church triumphant. How we're all one and united.
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Tim Gray
I love it. At our church, I could have seen Thomas More and we sing the litany of the saints. And it's just such a beautiful. I mean, in long litany and at St. Thomas More, it's this really big church in the south side of Denver. It has a great collection of relics. So on All Saints day, the altar and altar can't fit all the relics we have. And so then there's all these other little tables that they set up in this background. And so you have all this, all these saints, and you can go up and venerate the saints and you have all these little placard names. And so after mass, there's a mob of people going up to venerate all these relics. And it's just really, really beautiful to think about. Here's all these saints that are praying for us, and yet most people don't realize in all those little reliquaries are bones. And so this is where we get this devotion to the praying for the dead and all souls and praying to the dead, who we know are canonized saints. This is why Halloween has kind of spun up all this idea of the dead and skeletons in people's yards.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, it's interesting though, because of course, instead of skeletons and zombies, the reason that we venerate relics is because we believe that those saints will get their bodies back at the resurrection. And so it's this really concrete, really visceral way of showing we believe that this body will rise again on the last day. So much so that we can venerate it and feel that the presence of the saint is there in a particular way because a part of their body is there. And that despite Halloween, that is a sort of weird thing to the world's perspective. But maybe Halloween is a way of explaining why that's so powerful. And obviously it's co opted in other ways.
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Tim Gray
But yeah, it's co opted, but we have to take it back. And I think one of the things to tell our kids or to go back to is I think of Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones coming back. And so the idea of the bones of these, of saints as relics, it is a sign of hope that Christ is going to be victorious in the end. He's going to set all the wrongs and evils of the world. And of course, one of the greatest evils we all have to suffer is death, the loss of life and the loss of a loved one. And yet we know, because Jesus, death and resurrection, he's victorious. And in the end, he will raise everyone up and we will get our bodies back. And it's a beautiful hope for those who die in Christ that we'll be with God. And so when I see a neighbor who's got all these ghouls and skeletons in their yard, you know, I could kind of freak out, like, why are they so fascinated by this kind of ghoulish undead or dead? And yet I see the skeletons, I know we will rise from the dead. So it's a matter of perspective, of how we want to look at it.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And really, Christians are like the original spooky.
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Tim Gray
Yeah, no, exactly.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Because one of the strange things about Christianity is that we brought bones from the necropolis. Right. In ancient Rome, the dead had their own city, the necropolis, the city of the dead. They didn't mix with the city of the living. This is like cemeteries were, you know, outside the city or underground. They're away from people. And Christians took those bones and brought them into churches and into the city. This is a very dramatic thing that happened. It's very strange. This was not intuitive to an ancient person at all, that you should have the bones of the dead among the living. But it's really because we believe they are still alive in heaven, even though they haven't, you know, gotten their bodies back. And so this is a very distinctive Christian belief and Christian practice of having sort of dead people around.
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Tim Gray
I know a good friend of mine says they were traveling in Mexico and how in that culture they really play up the idea of the dead in Such a big way. But they said how at first it seemed so ghoulish on the outside because the celebration of the dead, and yet when they would go into a house, they were remembering their dead and praying for their dead, and it was with real devotion. And so there's a real beauty to this. And I think that kind of captures this Catholic tradition.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And having it paired, All Souls and all Saints paired, I think helps us to see how it's hopeful because we know that the saints are in heaven. So we don't know about all the souls, but we know the saints are in heaven. And so when we think about the saints, we think about beauty, radiance, glory, perfection. And so to pair that with all souls is to realize the celebration of the dead is not about sort of scary, you know, blood and guts. It's about the hope of perfection and the hope of heaven. And so having them together like that, I think is very helpful for helping to frame what this celebration of the dead is all about.
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Tim Gray
Well, when we talk about all souls and the need to pray for those that we love or that we knew who have passed on before us, and of course, we do that at every Mass, we pray for the dead. So that's part of. Part of the prayers of every Mass. And so I always pray, pray for those who, like my in laws, for example, Chris's parents who passed away. I always pray for them at every Mass. A friend of mine, Father Rick, who passed away, Father Rick Rohr, who's a good friend of ours, and other members of my family and other people I know who passed away to pray for. But that gets to the idea of purgatory, how we can help them. And so maybe it's helpful just to touch on purgatory here because a lot of people, even a lot of good Catholics, we know instinctively we should pray for the dead. But people don't understand purgatory very well. What would you say to our audience about purgatory? How do they get their minds around this?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. So what I would say first about purgatory is that the Catholic doctrine of purgatory is actually kind of sparse. So we have populated our imagination with Dante or with maybe private revelations of the saints about what purgatory is like. Purgatory is a specific place. And some of those things may be true, but I mean, in terms of what the Church teaches about purgatory is simply that there's a final purgation after death. And so what that means is that we sort of when we die, you either die, you Know, a saint completely attached to the will of God, or you die completely turned away from God. Or for probably half the majority of us, we die attached to God, but not having fully surrendered. And so this final purgation is a way of being united to God. You could think about it in terms of fire. Maybe, you know, fire unites, fire burns, but fire also purifies. And so there's only one divine fire, but there's three sort of different states. You could find yourself in that fire.
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Tim Gray
I think that's a beautiful way to talk about it, that analogy of fire, Liz. Because, you know, for some people, they think, well, you know, how could. How could there be a hell if God's all loving and merciful, but God respects the state of our soul? And if our soul is fundamentally opposed to God's will, and we're in resentment and anger at God? Well, then I believe the souls. If God in his mercy was to take the souls out of hell and bring them to heaven, they would burn hotter in heaven than they do in hell, and there'd be more pain in heaven. In a sense, I think God makes himself least present in hell. And so. So hell is a sign of God's mercy because, you know, the angels that are closest to God. So I think of Isaiah, chapter 6, when Isaiah is taken up into the heavenly throne room and he sees the seraphim, and they're the highest of the nine choirs of angel and seraphim, literally in Hebrew, means a seraph, means burning ones. These are the angels so close to God, who is a consuming fire. They're like on fire. And one of those, you know, Isaiah says, woe is me. I'm a man of unclean lips. I dwell amidst of a people of unclean lips. And my eyes are going to see the Lord of glory. How can I speak to him? And the seraph goes and takes hot tongs and goes to the altar of incense, which has hot coals. And a seraph who is a burning one, uses tongs to grab one of the hot coals, and then he puts it up to Isaiah's lips. And he says, this which has touched your lips, has purified and taken away your sin, right? So Isaiah, before he's put before the throne of God, he goes through purgation. So in other words, Isaiah 6 to me is one of the most powerful scriptural passages that gives us a window into somebody who's taken before God's presence. And they go through purgatory. Literally, he goes through purgatory. He goes through a purgation Right. Purgatory doesn't have to be a room or a separate place. It's a process. Right?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. That's an important thing you bring up in general about heaven, hell and purgatory is we tend to think of them as place. And they may be a place in some sense because we'll have bodies, but they're fundamentally a state. That's what we think about first, and that's the kind of language the catechism uses, is that these are three states of the soul. And so I think that's. That's important to keep in mind too, when we're thinking even about our hope of heaven, because sometimes we think about it as like a room full of M&Ms, but it's not. Right. It's being in the presence of God. And in order to be in the presence of God in a way which is, you know, blissful, you have to be in a state in which you can have union with God. And so that's where purgation fits in, just as you said with Isaiah.
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Tim Gray
Yeah. To be in the presence of God's pure love, we have to be pure. Otherwise there's something painful when there's self love and selfishness before selfless holy love. And that selfishness has to be purged. And that's a process depending on how much selfishness we have. And of course, if our selfishness is fundamental and inherent in a significant way, then we can't be ever be in God's presence and enjoy that and be at peace. And that's what hell is.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
There's a beautiful story by JR Tolkien about purgatory called Leaf by Niggle. I don't know if you've ever read it.
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Tim Gray
I have not read that long.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
You should read it. But it does. It has a very wonderful way of showing this, like how prayers for the dead can help. And it's because it's these two sort of neighbors in life who didn't necessarily get along and didn't necessarily do for each other all that they should have done. And when they're going through this process of purgation, they help to finish sort of each other's leftover tasks from life together and then together are able to enter into the sort of the mountains in the distance. And anyway, I encourage you to read it if, you know, during this season, during November sometime, maybe read Leaf by Niggle as a way of reflecting on purgatory. It's a very English purgatory, you know, so it's very sort of mild. There's the countryside, you know, there's tea and that kind of thing. So you can. But I do think that this is this idea of purgation. That's one reason why you have so many different understandings or imaginations in a sense of purgatory in different saints and different literary works, because it isn't really a very simple. This is a place. It's. It's a final purgation that allows us to enter into God's presence. And I think there are many ways in which we can sort of understand that. There are many different ways of helping us envision what that might be like.
- [22:41]
Tim Gray
I think it's so important that this idea of purgation is about purifying our love and our relationships. And God is a relationship. As you know, you wrote the book on God, as we like to joke here, Elizabeth wrote a book called What Every Catholic Should Know. And it's a beautiful description of the Trinity. And God is a community of persons in his inmost mystery, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And there's something in the mystery of God's plan that we can pray for our dead loved ones. And our prayers for them out of love for them helps them through purgatory. How does it help them? Well, in my mind, it's because purgatory is strengthening pure love, and it's cleansing us of our false loves. Right. And our selfishness. And when we pray for a loved one in purgatory, or in having. Going through purgatory, whatever, however that is, they know that we're praying for them. And the fact that they know that out of love, we remember them, and out of love we're holding them close, they feel loved, and it strengthens their love. It. It puts them on that journey to pure love, to become closer and to be with God fully. It speeds them on their way. And I think the way it speeds them on their way is by feeling our love and remembering us and remembering our love for them and knowing that we're still remembering them, their love is strengthened, and it's helping them in that process. Yeah.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
I'm so glad you brought up the Trinity, because if heaven is life with God, life with the Trinity, which is perfect relationship, perfect communion, then doesn't it just make a lot of sense that continued love and communion with those souls would help them enter that life? I mean, it's true on earth. If you want to sort of help somebody become a better person, what do you need to do? Well, you first need to be a better person yourself. You need to model it for them. You need to pray for them. You need to give them the love, right? And so that's also true of those who are undergoing their final purgation towards perfect communion with God and with others in heaven.
- [24:49]
Tim Gray
Well, that's what it's all about, is we're called to participate in the love of God. And that's what's so joyous. And that's why these two feasts really belong together in such a beautiful way. All souls where we have the charity to love, to pray for those who have gone before us, to care for them and to cheer them on, on their journey to be fully in God's presence and his love. And then we have the great solemnity of all saints, and it's those who have. We know they've gone through that journey and they're with God and they're cheering us on. And so we celebrate the victory of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clair, you know, of St. Monica and St. Augustine. I have to give a shout out to our patrons. We have their relics here in our chapel, and so we celebrate them, and then they then encourage us in the celebration of them, that we want to be like them. We want to be champions of love, champions in Christ, to run this race with a great cloud of witnesses. I think of that beautiful image in Hebrews chapter 12 that we are running this race, but we're not alone. And that's the beautiful thing is God gives us elder brothers and sisters in Christ this great family. And so we are to see Brother Francis and Mother Teresa of Calcutta as older siblings in the faith. That's such a beautiful thing.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And I think this, like, happiness, joy and celebration juxtaposed with the idea of death really does make Halloween kind of fundamentally Catholic, because we can, in a way, celebrate death and laugh at death because we know death is defeated and we know that it ends in the lives of the saints. And so even this sort of strange holiday that's gone in all these weird directions does have a fundamentally Catholic core. Because we celebrate death, we laugh at death, not because death is a good thing, but because God is able to bring good and beauty out of a bad thing. And so that's why you have this sort of strange juxtaposition of both joy and death in the holiday.
- [26:52]
Tim Gray
You know, I love that because death is without a supernatural perspective, without Jesus, death and resurrection, death seems so absolute and final, right? But for Christians, we're relativists when it comes to death, because we know that we're dead or as Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 15, or as he says to the Thessalonians, we sleep now, the dead sleep now, but they will be awakened by Christ in his second coming and giving back their bodies. So it does give us a perspective that's so important, especially in light of COVID you know, this whole year of COVID and, you know, it's a terrible pandemic. And yet from the Christian perspective, it gives us a different perspective than the world, Right? I love how you said, Liz, that we can laugh at death, or we could say with Paul, o death, where is thy sting?
- [27:44]
Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right?
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Tim Gray
And the world is in panic about COVID and understandably so. We need to be concerned and careful and prudent. But we can't let it just overwhelm us, Right? We can't let Covid depress us. We can't let the fear of death overwhelm us in such a way that it robs us of our joy and of our peace.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And the catechism says that the Christian can have a healthy desire for death. And you think, do I have a healthy desire for death? But when we look at, especially the lives of the. And a lot of the martyrs, they were able to finally, when faced with the choice between denying God or facing death, they were able to have a healthy desire for death. And sort of healthy desire for death does kind of encapsulate, in a sense, what happens, you know, for Halloween. All saints and all souls together, right?
- [28:34]
Tim Gray
We don't need to be afraid of it, and we can actually desire death, as Paul does in his letter to the Philippians. You know, he longs for death to be united with Christ, and that's the desire that all those souls in purgatory have. They are straining to be in God's presence. They want the beatific vision fully, and they long for that. And we can help cheer them on by our prayers for them, which is a great call for us to practice charity. And we can celebrate the saints who have overcome death in Christ. And we want to imitate their faith and their love and their hope, and that's what the world needs today in a desperate way. Well, you know, as we go into this holiday, this holiday weekend with Halloween and the great feasts, I hope that this has given you an encouragement, a way of looking at Halloween, maybe a way of practicing Halloween in our Catholic families that would be more edifying and educational for our kids, and yet celebratory. You know, they can go get candy and have fun and dress up and. And we don't have to withdraw from the world. We just have to use our wisdom to overcome the world in Christ. Right. And to celebrate All Souls Day with faith and to really celebrate the solemnity of all saints. Celebrate, you know have a great meal really go out all out for that celebration of the saints so that we can celebrate them with the great banquet of the Lamb's supper that we're all called to and the eschatological banquet with Christ at the end that the book of Revelation gives us. So there's a lot to reflect on and a lot to celebrate from a Christian perspective for this weekend. So thank you very much for joining us and I hope this has blessed and enriched you and I want to thank everybody who supports us through the mission circle. Your support allows us to have our ministry. We're so grateful you're participants with us in this mission and I ask the Lord to bless and keep all of you. Take care and have a safe and blessed and holy weekend. Take care.