Franciscan Clarean Reflection for All Saints and All Souls

Franciscan Clarean Reflection for All Saints and All Souls

A Communion of Holy Mischief

All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2) remind us that the Franciscan Clarean family is larger than we can see. It includes every holy rebel, barefoot mystic, and gentle soul who has ever said “yes” to Love. In the words of Francis, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”

For Clareans, sainthood isn’t marble perfection—it’s earthy, tender fidelity to love in the face of empire, despair, and apathy. The saints are our siblings in the great experiment of mercy. They show us that holiness often wears work boots and smells faintly of compost and candle wax.

All Saints Day: Celebrating the Cloud of Witnesses

We honor not only canonized saints but all who have lived the Beatitudes with reckless grace—the peacemakers, the caretakers, the truth-tellers, the queer prophets, the nameless neighbors who carried the light through the world’s long nights.
In Franciscan Clarean spirituality, this “cloud of witnesses” includes St. Francis and St. Clare, yes—but also anyone who dared to love without condition, resist oppression, and restore creation. Their sainthood is contagious; it reminds us to live audaciously holy lives right now.

Ritual Suggestions

Light seven candles for the seven virtues of Franciscan Clarean life: humility, simplicity, joy, service, compassion, creation-care, and holy mischief.

Read the Canticle of the Creatures and add your own verses naming today’s saints and struggles.

Share bread and soup with your community or the unhoused, recognizing the living saints among you.

All Souls Day: Remembering the Beloved Departed

This day honors those who have crossed the thin veil between worlds. In the Franciscan Clarean way, death is not an ending but a transformation—a returning to God’s embrace. We practice the memento mori not with fear, but with gratitude that life and death alike are sacred threads in the same tapestry.

Ritual Suggestions

Create an altar of remembrance: photos, candles, simple offerings like flowers, stones, or favorite foods.

Pray the Peace Prayer of St. Francis, naming those who need healing and those who have gone before.

Write letters to your ancestors—biological and spiritual—thanking them for what they planted in you.

A Prophetic Call

In a world obsessed with power and consumption, the twin feasts of All Saints and All Souls invite a radical remembrance: that our lives are bound together across time and death. The Communion of Saints calls us to resist forgetfulness. To remember the martyrs of climate justice, of racial struggle, of poverty and war, is to proclaim that love outlasts empire.

As the world groans with ecological collapse and moral exhaustion, the Franciscan Clarean response is not despair—it’s defiant joy. We are called to be living saints—the holy fools who dare to believe peace is still possible.