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.
