All Souls

 Today, like yesterday - though in a different key- we are professing our faith in those two last articles of the Creed that we sing every Sunday. We are professing our faith in “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” These are the final unfolding in humanity of our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead on the 3rd day, the centre of our faith.
 Today as the Collect beautifully puts it, “our faith is lifted up in your Son raised from the dead.” Our faith is lifted up, attollitur in Latin, meaning “lifted up, raised up, elevated,” like a flag or a banner or a sword.
 There’s so much we don’t know about the dead. We don’t know about the condition of individuals. We don’t know how prayer, the offering of the Mass, the gaining of indulgences, good works and so on -  all those good Catholic practices - actually help the dead. We don’t know - at least I don’t - how events in the world of the dead (like judgment, like entering heaven for example) connect or synchronise with events in our world. Faith, said St John of the Cross, echoing the whole tradition of the Church, is certainty in darkness. And there’s still a lot of darkness for us. We don’t know either how each of us, here and now, stands before God. But this darkness is somehow contained within the brightness of God. The very darkness creates a space. It calls forth our faith and hope. The silence of the dead is not to make us turn to Ouija boards, but to listen to the word of the Lord.
 We believe that God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, that the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of iniquity.
 We hear our Lord saying that it’s the Father’s will he should lose nothing of all those given him. We hear him praying, “I want those you have given me to be with me where I am.”
 We believe he died and rose so that the gates of heaven would be flung wide open for humanity, and that the Holy Spirit is at work in every human heart to connect us with the Paschal mystery.
 We believe that all in Christ, living on earth, seeing God face to face in heaven, or being purified after death, form one body, one family, and that love and prayer have no boundaries.
 So in every Mass the Church prays for all who have died in God’s mercy, all those marked with sign of faith, all whose faith is know to God alone. She prays for them especially today. And we pray with her.
 And what great, big-souled, large-minded prayers they are, those in the Missal:
 - that God’s departed servants may be taken up into glory with his Son, that they may pass into the house of light and peace;
 - that their sins may be washed away in the blood of Christ, that they may be cleansed by the sacramental mysteries, liberated from the chains of death, receive the joys of eternal happiness, contemplate their Maker and Redeemer face to face and rejoice in the gift of the resurrection to come.
 Our Lord had a mother, Newman once wrote, “to put honour on all those earthly relations and connections which are ours by nature; and to teach us that, though He has begun a new creation, He does not wish us to cast off the old creation, as far as it is not sinful. Hence it is our duty to love and honour our parents, brothers, sisters, friends, husbands, wives, not only not less, but even more than it was man’s duty before our Lord came on earth.” And part of that love and honour is prayer. And prayer, he ends, “not only for the living, but for the dead, who have died in the grace of God, that He may shorten their time of expiation, and admit them into His presence above.”
 Today is a day for this faith, hope and love. Let us not be bashful, either, about sharing it with our non-Catholic friends. It can often hearten and comfort them, and lead them on. The vision we are given, let us pass on!

        
Fr Hugh, O. S. B.