In this ambiguous search for sanctity around us, the feast of all saints, the celebration of the communion of saints in heaven and on earth comes to our aid. In the heart of autumn, after the reaping, the harvest of the fields and of the vineyards in our countryside, the Church asks us to contemplate the reaping of all the living sacrifices offered to God, the harvest to God of all the ripe fruits brought about by God’s love and grace among men. The feast of all saints is truly a memorial of the Church’s glorious autumn, the feast against solitude, against every isolation that afflicts the human heart: if there were no saints, if we did not believe “in the communion of saints” — which not by chance is part of our profession of faith — we would be shut up in a desperate and despairing solitude. On this day we ought to sing: “We are not alone, we are a living communion!” We ought to renew the Easter canticle, because, if at Easter we contemplated Christ living forever on the Father’s right hand, today, thanks to the energies of the resurrection, we contemplate those who are with Christ on the Father’s right hand: the saints. At Easter we sang that the vine was living, risen; today the Church invites us to sing that the branches, cleansed and pruned by the Father on the vine that is Christ, have given their fruit, have produced an abundant vintage and that these clusters, gathered and pressed together form a single wine, the wine of the Kingdom.