by CCW | 2 November 2015 21:00
It is a provocative and compelling image and the setting for the continuation of the radical meaning of Christ the Good Shepherd. In other words, it belongs to the theme of gathering, to Christ’s gathering of our humanity to himself in truth and love. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give them eternal life.” Pretty powerful words that go to the answer to the question, “If thou be the Christ tell us plainly,” to which Jesus responded, “I told you and ye believed not.” Somehow our believing hinges upon our hearing the voice of Jesus. Only so can we discover that we are embraced in the Son’s love for the Father.
The Feast of All Saints’ embraces the Solemnity of All Souls’. From the glory of the Saints we turn to the somber realities of our common mortality. The gathering of the Saints in glory does not simply eclipse the darkness of death, the common death that awaits us all. Such thoughts may seem to belong to the winter of our souls but they simply underline the point of the Burial Office that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing, not even death. Why? Because Christ goes through the valley of the shadow of death for us and with us. The golden thread of the life of Christ runs through the grave and gate of death.
We are tasked to remember and in so doing we discover yet another one of our failings. We cannot always remember even those who were once so close and dear to us. Names and faces fade from our minds and memories. They may or may not be stirred again to memory by some thought, word or action but they are not simply and readily always there in our minds. We confront our limitations. Our memories are fragile and fragmented.
But the lessons of All Souls’ remind us of God’s greater knowing and his all-sufficient remembering. In a way, that is the real point. We participate in our feeble way in God’s all-knowing and all-loving of our humanity, of you and me. As the lesson[1] puts it, “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.” As the Gospel reading[2] recalls, those who hear the voice of Jesus and follow him are secure in the hands of Christ and his Father. “Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand … no one is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.” We are known in God and to God and in his knowing love of all souls, all the departed.
They are beyond number and beyond name but not beyond Christ’s embrace of our humanity, not beyond the Son’s loving knowledge of us in his love for the Father in the embrace of the Spirit. This is a kind of wisdom, the wisdom signaled in the lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon and signaled by the poignant image of Christ walking in the temple in Solomon’s porch in winter. There is a gathering of all souls to Christ in the sombre grey darkness of November, a joy found in and through the sorrows of death. We are gathered together in the arms of the Good Shepherd knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
Fr. David Curry
All Souls, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/11/02/meditation-for-all-souls-day-2/
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