Like other families, our list gets longer,” noted the wife. We were jotting names for All Souls Day requiem masses. She adds, wistfully: “Sooner rather than later, somebody will have to write our names in, too.”
“Death is only a horizon,” the old prayer says. “And a horizon is the limit of our sight… We give back to You, Lord, who first gave them to us: our faithful dead, whose beauty and truth are even now in our hearts.”
Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic churches commemorate the faithful departed on Nov. 2, BBC writes. They pray for those still atoning for misdeeds.
All Hallows Eve or Halloween marked the Celtic new year. In 1848, Irish immigrants brought the feast to the US. When younger, the wife and I trailed two grand-daughters, in spooky dresses, knocking for “trick or treat” goodies in a San Francisco suburb.
Here, we’d light with our grandchildren candles before graves of family members. The customs resemble Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos. Now, grandkids have disappeared into US and Swedish schools. We place flowers on graves of relatives whose families vanished in the immigration diaspora.
There is an overload of spot broadcasts or reports: traffic jams, squatters living in cemeteries turned into two-day “cities”, zapped by karaoke. Yet, some 2,500 years before Easter’s empty tomb, an ailing Job cried: “Oh, that my words were engraved in rock forever. I know my Redeemer lives. And in the end, He will stand forth upon the earth. And after my skin shall have been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
Or try 175 BC to 134 BC. A Jewish rebellion broke out against the ruling dynasty. And Judas Maccabeus wrote: “It is a good and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.”
From its start, the Church prayed for the dead. By year 998, Abbot Oddilo of Cluny picked Nov. 2 for this remembrance. The practice spread to other countries by 10th century’s end. The living can help the departed, the doctrine went, by asceticism’s trio of prayer, sacrifice, and alms.
“Who doesn’t have unfinished business with someone whom death has taken?” asks Fr. Ron Rolheiser. But it’s never too late if we take seriously the communion of saints tenet. Enshrined in our creed, it says we’re in real community with those who have died.
“Death washes some things clean.” Where hurts prevailed, it can bring peace, clarity, and a charity that were not possible before. Why?
It’s not simply because the death changed the chemistry, and took someone out of the family, the office, or friends. Or as sometimes may seem the case, the source of the tension. It happens because, as Luke’s account of Jesus on the cross teaches, “Today you will be with me in paradise!”
Jesus speaks those words to the good thief on the cross . And they’re meant for every one of us who dies without yet fully being a saint, and without having had the time and opportunity to make all the amends, and speak all the apologies that we owe to others.
“There is still time after death, on both sides, for reconciliation and healing to happen. Inside the communion of saints, we have access to each other. “And there, we can finally speak of those words that we couldn’t speak before. We reach across death’s divide.”
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Those words were spoken by an angel to Mary Magdalene when she came to anoint Jesus body in the garden tomb.
Curious words? Perhaps. They contain, though, a secret. Seek for them among the living, not among the dead. “We will meet the ones we can no longer touch by placing ourselves in situations where their spirits can flourish,” John Shea writes.
Every good person shapes the infinite life and compassion of God in his or her unique way. When that person dies, we must seek him or her among the living.
Whether in the dim catacombs off Rome’s Appian way, or in our garishly-lighted cemeteries, All Souls’ Day speaks to us again in Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s poignant verse: “Death is not the extinguishing of life. It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.”
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