ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER
Saints celebrated on the 11th of October
Prayer to the Angels and the Saints
Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.
In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.
Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.
Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.
ST ETHELBURGA, VIRGIN AND ABBESS
St Ethelburga [Ethelburge, Edilburge] was an English Saxon princess, sister to St Erconwald, bishop of London. To the end that she might live entirely to herself and God, she in her youth renounced the world, and neither riches nor the tempting splendour of a court could shake her resolution; for the world loses all its influence upon a mind which is wholly taken up with the great truths of faith and eternal salvation.
St Erconwald considered only the perfection of his sister’s virtue, not flesh and blood, when he appointed her abbess of the great nunnery which he had founded at Barking in Essex. Ethelburga, by her example and spirit, sweetly led on all the chaste spouses of Christ in that numerous house in the paths of true virtue and Christian perfection.
How entirely they were dead both to the world and to themselves, and how perfectly divine charity reigned in their souls!
When a raging pestilence swept off a part of this community, in 664, all rejoiced in their last moments, and thought even every day and every hour, long before they went to the possession of their God, to love and praise whom with all their powers, and without interruption for eternity, was the pure and vehement desire with which they were inflamed; and the living envied the dying.
The comfort of those that survived was in the divine will, and in knowing their retardment could be but for a moment, that they might labour perfectly to purify their hearts, before they were united to their friends, the saints, and swallowed up in a glorious immortality.
St Ethelburga survived this mortality for the support and comfort of the rest. Having sent before her so many saints to heaven, she met her own death with a great spirit, and her glory was manifested by miraculous visions. St Ethelburga's body was honoured at Nunnaminstre in Winchester.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)
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