Meditation for All Souls’ Day
“Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and may light perpetual shine upon them”
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.
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,