ALL SOULS' DAY

ALL SOULS

Wisdom 3:1-9; Philippians 3:20-21; John 14:1-6.

AIM: To help the hearers understand death and prayer for the dead.

 

When a baby is born, we like to speculate about its future. Perhaps the little one will be famous one day: a great scientist, a musician, an artist, an entrepreneur, an adventurer, a writer. Catholic mothers may pray that the boy they hold in their arms will grow up to be a holy priest, like Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, both of them saints. If the little one is a girl, she could be a holy nun like Mother Teresa. At life’s beginning all possibilities are open.

There is a limit, however, to all our maybes and perhapses. Of no one, at any age, do we ever say: “Perhaps he or she will die.” For death is the common lot of every one of us. The eighteenth-century Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson, famed for his witty sayings but also a devout Christian, said once: “Depend upon it, Sir: when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

In a sense we are all like the man who knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight. We all know that we must die, though none of us knows the time or manner of our death. There is no reason why this knowledge should not concentrate our minds wonderfully. And what better time to think of death than on All Souls Day, which we celebrate today? It comes each year on the second of November, the day after yesterday’s feast of All Saints.

The first experience of death comes, for each of us, differently. For me, the encounter with death came at age six-and-a-half when, a day after Christmas, my father came home from the hospital, to which my27-year-old mother had been taken just a week before, with pneumonia, and spoke the three most terrible words I have ever heard: “Mummy is dead.”

Three days later, I stood by an open grave and, to the accompaniment of the solemn words, “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” I heard the heavy clods of earth raining down on my mother’s coffin -- the most terrible sound I have ever heard.    

That tragedy marked me with a scar which I shall carry to my own grave. From this tragedy there came later, however, a great blessing. Not year later it came home to me one day with blinding certainty that I would see my dear mother again, when God called me home. If my mother’s death was the greatest sorrow in my life, the realization that the parting was for a time only was-- and remains -- my greatest joy.

From that joyful realization has come a deep conviction of the reality of the unseen, spiritual world: the world of God, of the angels, of the saints, of our beloved dead. That world is real to me, because I know people who are there: my mother first of all, and since her death so many other loved ones who have gone ahead of me to that eternal dwelling place which, as Jesus promises us in today=s gospel, he has prepared for each of us in our Father’s house. 

The memories we have of our beloved dead, and the mementoes -- the photos, the things they saw and used and wore -- are precious.  But those things belong to the past. And the past is receding, ever farther away. We come closest to our beloved dead not through memories and mementoes, but by coming close to God; for the dead are now with God. That is why, at life’s end, we come into the Lord’s house to celebrate the Church’s central mystery and sacrament: the sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass is the pledge of the abiding presence with us until the end of time of the One who has conquered death, and who is waiting for each of us at the end of life’s road. His name is Jesus Christ. 

 If death were really the end, simply the snuffing out of a candle, then it would be fearful indeed. Our Christian and Catholic faith tells us, however, that death is not the end. It is the gateway to new life. Death is the entry into our true homeland. “We have our citizenship in heaven,” Paul tells us in our second reading. Through death we come home to the family of the Trinity. We shall be able to share in the joy with which the Father loves the Son. We shall experience the love which binds Father and Son together the Holy Spirit. 

Though our faith assures us that death is not the end, few of us can completely banish the fear of death. Yet we experience death every day, without ever realizing it. Every night we die to our normal mode of consciousness and fall asleep, so that we can awake again the next morning refreshed.         

This pattern of death and rising again goes on all through life. If the child in the womb could know what lay ahead, the prospect of birth would be terrifying: leaving the security and warmth of the mother to enter an alien world, another mode of existence. No wonder that the first thing babies do is cry! Later on, children must die to their infantile state of being and consciousness in order to become adolescents. And adolescents must die if they are to become adults. This dying and rising goes on through middle age and old age until, finally, every one of us must make the final passage through death to new life with God in our true, heavenly homeland. 

All these deaths, save the last one, are in some sense voluntary. The child can refuse to grow up, clinging to childhood and remaining attached to mother. More than a century ago, the English writer James Barrie wrote a famous play about a boy who refused to grow up: Peter Pan. Adolescents too can refuse responsibility, declining to face the burden of maturity. The middle-aged man can refuse to grow old, to surrender his position as head of a family or a business, clinging to power. When children mature and leave home, mothers can refuse to let go, to accept them as independent adults. The result is frustration and unhappiness on all sides.

 If we are willing to let go at each stage of life, however -- to die to childhood, to adolescence, to middle age, not clinging desperately to the old ways of thinking and feeling but embracing the fresh challenges which life brings at each age -- then we shall find that the final death loses its terrors. Most of us are prepared gradually for death by the shocks life brings us: our setbacks, the death of loved ones, the gradual loss of our own energy and faculties. If we accept these things when they come and don’t resist the changes they bring, we begin to find new meaning in each event, even in the most tragic. To the extent that we do this, we catch a glimpse of the resurrection.

         Let me conclude with another personal recollection. A few days after my mother’s funeral my father told me: “We must still pray for Mummy. She is with God. God is looking after her and our prayers can help her.” That made sense to me when I was only six-and-a-half. It makes sense to me today, when I have read many books of theology and my hair has grown grey. One of the greatest joys of priesthood, for me, is being able to stand, at the altar, on the threshold of that unseen eternal world of which we were made citizens in baptism. In that world, the dwelling place of our beloved dead, there is no more suffering, no more loneliness, no more grief, no injustice, failure, or misunderstanding. There, as we read twice over the book of Revelation, God will wipe away all tears from our eyes. There we shall experience ecstasy, for we shall see God face to face.