by CCW | 2 November 2009 08:36
The Feast of All Saints embraces The Solemnity of All Souls. The one envisions the end and perfection of our humanity in the glory of heaven. Such is the Communion of Saints. The other recalls our sins and imperfections in the darkness of death and the stark reality of our mortality, common to us all. Such is the Solemnity of All Souls. Christ embraces both the glory and the grave.
In the year 998, as part of the Cluniac reform of Benedictine monasticism in Europe, Odilo of Cluny established the Commemoration of All Souls. It may seem morbid and dreary, negative and depressing, not to mention just plain, cold and miserable. After all, this is November! But why trouble our heads with what we would rather not think, let alone face and shiver? Ours is the culture of death through the distancing of death from our lives; death is even contracted out. But to the contrary, there is something wonderfully healthy and true about the Solemnity of All Souls. It signals nothing less than a mature and profound understanding of the Christian Faith.
The Christian Religion does not hide from view the realities of sin and death. Quite the opposite, it sets those things before us with an uncomfortable if not an unbearable clarity. It gives us a way to think about such hard and difficult things. Such is the way of charity. The death and resurrection of Christ is always front and centre to the Christian outlook, to the pattern of Christian life itself. There is the Communion of Saints which is not about “pie-in-the-sky/ by-and-by,” as if heaven were a vain hope and religion merely “the opiate of the masses,” as someone who was once famous once famously said. No. It signals, instead, the real meaning of our fellowship and communion, the real meaning of lives lived together in a community of faith, a community of faith that is far greater than what we can imagine, let alone see.
The thread of gold that runs through the lives of the saints is the life of Christ in them. That golden thread runs through the grave of our common death. Nothing, not even the nothingness of death, lies outside the embrace of God in Christ. The fact of sin, of suffering, and of death is all gathered up in the embrace of the Cross, in the arms of the crucified Christ. See how he loves us! Nothing, not even death, says St. Paul, “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” words so familiar, so convicting and so convincing in the Burial Office.
“I had not thought that death had undone so many,” Dante, the pilgrim, says to Virgil in The Divine Comedy while looking upon that myriad of souls in the Vestibule of Hell, souls who “willed and then unwilled their will,” unable to stick at anything, blown about, instead, on the winds of every whim and fancy, following the crowd, going with the flow, determined by nothing but their indeterminacy.
A great multitude, but hardly the whole of our humanity in its passing. No. There is an even greater multitude, far beyond number. What is true for the whole of our humanity is true for the saints; they are a number greater than we can number and, certainly, far, far more than we can name.
We confront not only the limits of our natural lives but as well the limits of our knowing and our remembering. And yet, in our own poor fashion, we endeavour to remember those whom we have known who have died: family members, friends, acquaintances; a seemingly mind-numbing array of souls that we can, it seems, remember. We remember them in their passing from us and we remember them by name. At least, we try.
Part of ritual of The Solemnity of All Souls, is the intentional remembering by name of those who have died in a particular parish. There is something quite wonderful about that, a sense of how the local parish is part of the universal Church in ways that are far more compelling than regulatory compliance with bureaucratic demands, be they civil or ecclesiastical.
The point of this intentional remembering is strong and illustrates just how hard it is to remember. How easily (and how sadly) we have forgotten even those who were quite dear to us! We are such forgetful creatures. And, yet, how many, many more have lived and died unknown, unnamed and unremembered by us? The limits to our remembering and our knowing are profound. We name names that are not known to us.
Mercifully, it is not so with God. This is the great charity of God. No soul falls outside the embrace of his knowing and loving. All are known to him and known wholly by him and known to him by name. What, then, is the point of our remembering? Our poor remembering is simply our sharing in God’s eternal remembering, his eternal knowing and loving of all souls. Prayer can only will what God wills for them and for us. Prayer can only seek his eternal purpose, for them and for us in our common passing. Rest eternal and light perpetual, the hope of those who believe in The Communion of Saints.
We can only seek what is best for them and for us. We place ourselves and those whom we remember with God in his eternal and perfect knowing and loving of all souls. Of your charity, I bid your prayers for all the faithful departed. The charity of your prayers is the charity of Christ who has borne our common death that he might raise us into the glory of the Communion of Saints in light. May our prayerful remembering enter into God’s eternal remembering of all the faithful departed.
Fr. David Curry, Meditation based on Homily given at the Little Dutch Church, Halifax, Nov. 2008
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/11/02/meditation-for-all-souls-day/
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