Being Alive in God:
The Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time 2026
November 8, 2026
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Wisdom 6:12-16; Psalm 63; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13
While the Gospel passage on the five wise virgins models for us the attentiveness needed for discipleship, the first reading focuses on the value of wisdom who likewise keeps vigil. It is wisdom special love for the Lord that makes her always watchful and filled with hope. This is the hope that comes through in the reading from Paul to the Thessalonians. A believer filled with wisdom always has hope.
We are in the month of All Souls when we commemorate our deceased loved ones, and we reflect upon our lives as we know that each of us will experience death. Death asks the question: In what do we hope? For a Christian, we know that while we are alive to God today, we will be alive to God after our death. What does that mean? Because of the death and resurrection of Christ, death no longer has the final word. Our relationship with God is not destroyed by death, and those who die in Christ are always remembered.
When a loved one dies, we might wonder about these types of questions. Will I see my parents, spouse, children, or friends once again? What happens to my body? Will I still be myself after death? What happens to a person after a lifetime of suffering, disability, or illness? How does God treat the person who was hurtful to me? What happens to those people whose faith was uncertain? These are natural questions to ask. Jesus revealed to us that God seeks us, forgives us, loves us, and has altered the state of death when God raised Jesus to new life. The resurrection reveals God’s intention for humanity – not abandonment, but communion, not destruction, but transformation, not the finality of death, but the fulfillment of life in God. We trust that this God will be faithful to us beyond the limits of our earthly lives.
During times of death, we ask, “What will happen to our loved ones,” and maybe we can ask, “What does it mean to be alive to God today?” Our destiny is to live in the fulness of God’s love, and we are called to start living this way right now. We are called to become more loving, more compassionate, more forgiving, and more generous. God’s life becomes visible in our own. Our earthly lives are the beginning of a life that is meant to grow in love, and we learn to live in a way that reflects God’s values. We live in God’s grace, and we must respond to that grace. When we do so, our lives become increasingly receptive to God’s love. The love we have given during this lifetime matters. Death does not wipe out or make the goodness of our lives meaningless. The lives we have touched matters. The goodness we received and passed on matters. We trust that God who has been drawing us deeper into divine life will bring to fulfillment what God has begun.
Naturally, we do not want to encounter death, and death of a loved one brings much loss and pain. For a believer, death cannot separate us from the God who loves us or from our loved ones. Love is an unknown power whose strength is greater than death. Our hope is based on the God that was revealed in Jesus Christ. Our loved ones are held within God’s love as we will be – warmly, tenderly, gently cherished. God, who is at work in us now calling us to a fulness of life, will bring the promise of the resurrection to fulfillment.
We do not know everything about what happens when we die, but we trust that the God who has given us life and drawn us into love will remember us and give us an even fuller life. We have comfort in the assurance that our final destiny rests in the hands of our God who is faithful, loving, and the source of all life. We are alive to God now, and we place our hope in being fully alive to God forever.
Scripture for Daily Mass
Monday: (Wisdom 3) The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.
Tuesday: (Philippians 2) Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.
Wednesday: (Philippians 2) My beloved, obedient as you have always been, not only when I am present but all the more now when I am absent, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work.
Thursday (Philippians 3) But whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
Friday (Philippians 3) Join with others in being imitators of me, brothers and sisters, and observe those who thus conduct themselves according to the model you have in us. For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction.
Saturday (Philippians 4) I rejoice greatly in the Lord that now at last you revived your concern for me. You were, of course, concerned about me but lacked an opportunity.
Not that I say this because of need, for I have learned, in whatever situation I find myself, to be self-sufficient.
Gospel:
Monday: (John 6) Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and I will not reject anyone who comes to me, because I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me.
Tuesday: (Luke 14) One of those at table with Jesus said to him, “Blessed is the one who will dine in the Kingdom of God.” He replied to him, “A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many. When the time for the dinner came, he dispatched his servant to say to those invited, ‘Come, everything is now ready.’
Wednesday (Luke 14) Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
Thursday (Luke 15) Or what woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it? And when she does find it, she calls together her friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found the coin that I lost.’
Friday (Luke 16) Jesus said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’
Saturday (Luke 16) “I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.
Saints of the Week
November 9: The dedication of Rome's Lateran Basilica was done by Pope Sylvester I in 324 as the pope's local parish as the bishop of Rome. It was originally called the Most Holy Savior and was built on the property donated by the Laterani family. It is named John Lateran because the baptistry was named after St. John. Throughout the centuries, it was attacked by barbarians, suffered damage from earthquakes and fires, and provided residence for popes. In the 16th century, it went through Baroque renovations.
November 10: Leo the Great, pope and doctor (d. 461) tried to bring peace to warring Roman factions that were leaving Gaul vulnerable to barbarian invasions. As pope, he tried to keep peace again - in particular during his meeting with Attila the Hun, whom he persuaded not to plunder Rome. However, in Attila's next attack three years later, Rome was leveled. Some of Leo's writings on the incarnation were influential in formulating doctrine at the Council of Chalcedon.
November 11: Martin of Tours, bishop (316-397), became an Roman soldier in Hungary because he was born into a military family. After he became a Christian, he left the army because he saw his faith in opposition to military service. He settled in Gaul and began its first monastery. He was proclaimed bishop in 371 and worked to spread the faith in at time of great uncertainty and conflict. He divided sections of his diocese into parishes.
November 12: Josaphat, bishop and martyr (1580-1623) was a Ukranian who entered the Basilian order and was ordained in the Byzantine rite. He was named the archbishop of Polotsk, Russia and attempted to unite the Ukrainian church with Rome. His opponents killed him. He is the first Eastern saint to be formally canonized.
November 13: Francis Xavier Cabrini, religious (1850-1917) was an Italian-born daughter to a Lombardy family of 13 children. She wanted to become a nun, but needed to stay at her parents’ farm because of their poor health. A priest asked her to help work in a girls’ school and she stayed for six years before the bishop asked her to care for girls in poor schools and hospitals. With six sisters, she came to the U.S. in 1889 to work among Italian immigrants. She was the first American citizen to be canonized.
November 13: Stanislaus Kostka, S.J., religious (1550-1568) was a Polish novice who walked from his home to Rome to enter the Jesuits on his 17th birthday. He feared reprisals by his father against the Society in Poland so we went to directly see the Superior General in person. Francis Borgia admitted him after Peter Canisius had him take a month in school before applying for entrance. Because of his early death, Kostka is revered as the patron saint of Jesuit novices.
November 14: Pedro Arrupe, S.J., Superior General (1917-1991) was the 28th Superior General of the Jesuits. He was born in the Basque region of the Iberian Peninsula. He is considered one of the great reformers of the Society because he was asked by the Pope to carry out the reforms of Vatican II. November 14th is the commemoration of his birth.
November 14: Joseph Pignatelli, S.J., religious and Superior General (1737-1811) was born in Zaragosa, Spain and entered the Jesuits during a turbulent era. He was known as the unofficial leader of the Jesuits in Sardinia when the Order was suppressed and placed in exile. He worked with European leaders to continue an underground existence and he was appointed Novice Master under Catherine the Great, who allowed the Society to receive new recruits. He secured the restoration of the Society partly in 1803 and fully in 1811 and bridged a link between the two eras of the Society. He oversaw a temperate reform of the Order that assured their survival.
This Week in Jesuit History
- November 8, 1769. In Spain, Charles III ordered all of the Society's goods to be sold and sent a peremptory demand to the newly elected Pope Clement XIV to have the Society suppressed.
- November 9, 1646. In England, Fr. Edmund Neville died after nine months imprisonment and ill-treatment. An heir to large estates in Westmoreland, he was educated in the English College and spent forty years working in England.
- November 10, 1549. At Rome, the death of Paul III, to whom the Society owes its first constitution as a religious order.
- November 11, 1676. In St James's Palace, London, Claude la Colombiere preached on All Saints.
- November 12, 1919. Fr. General Ledochowski issued an instruction concerning the use of typewriters. He said that they could be allowed in offices but not in personal rooms, nor should they be carried from one house to another.
- November 13, 1865. The death of James Oliver Van de Velde, second bishop of the city of Chicago from 1848 to 1853.
- November 14, 1854. In Spain, the community left Loyola for the Balearic Isles, in conformity with a government order.
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