by CCW | 3 November 2020 20:00
The Feast of All Saints embraces the Solemnity of All Souls. This is our comfort and consolation. We are reminded that the great multitude which no man can number includes the vast array of souls who have died and gone before us. True enough. But the Solemnity of All Souls confronts us with the limits of human memory.
Our memories are fragile and finite. We have in our parishes various ways in which we try to remember those who have gone before us in our churches, our communities and our families signalled in memorial plaques and window dedications and so forth. The sad and bitter truth is that our memories are poor and fragile things. At the time, there is the feeling of the intensity of loss but in the course of time that fades away like the leaves of autumn. We confront the sad failing of our memories.
This is hardly a comfort. Yet All Souls is the strongest possible counter and comfort to our failing memories. It reminds us in no uncertain terms that God’s remembering is not like our remembering, fragile and incomplete, more about forgetting than unforgetting. All Souls signals the profoundly comforting idea that all souls are known and loved in God. That is surely our comfort, our strength and our salvation.
It belongs to the radical meaning of the second Beatitude. “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” Not only do we need not be defined by suffering or sorrow, by loss and death, but neither are we defeated and discouraged by our failures to remember those who were once so dear to us. Why not? Because they are remembered in God, known and loved in God. And so are we. The remembering of All Souls recalls us to who we are in God’s eternal loving and knowing of us. That is a great comfort and consolation in our shattered and broken world. All Souls is about God’s remembering love moving in us. That is always greater than our sorrows and loss.
Fr. David Curry
Solemnity of All Souls (transf.)
November 3rd, 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/11/03/sermon-for-all-souls-day/
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