Memento mori (mid-week message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Memento mori  

Nov. 2, 2016

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

And no torment will ever touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died,

And their departure was thought to be a disaster,

And their going from us to be their destruction;

But they are at peace. 

For though in the sight of others they were punished,

Their hope is in immortality.

(Wisdom 3:1-4)

Today is All Souls’ Day, the commemoration of all the faithful departed.  Where All Saints’ Day remembers those whom we as a community have come to acknowledge as models and examples in faith, whom we ask to pray for us, All Souls’ remembers all the rest of our brothers and sisters whom we have lost to death, and for whom we pray. 

We pray for the dead because it is a natural desire of the human heart, and since ultimately death is such a mystery to us.   C.S. Lewis wrote, “Of course, I pray for the dead.  The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him?” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).

Since it is so hard for us to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many of us approach All Souls’ as an occasion to remember and pray for all the dead, confident that God wants to save all his creatures, and hopeful that, in the end, God’s love will overcome all our human crankiness and resistance.   Perhaps, just perhaps, all the departed will one day be faithful departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s, not ours.  In any case, as the Prayer Book says, there are many of the dead whose faith “is known alone to God.” 

All Souls’ is often experienced very much as a family feast, when we remember those closest to us who have gone on before. 

In all the variety of world religions, there are different ways of remembering the dead.   All have burial and mourning customs.  But further on, we have commemorative practices that keep our remembrance alive.  Jews light a Yahrzeit candle and recite the Kaddish; Roman Catholics offer requiem masses.  The Chinese on a bright and clear day in the spring go to family tombs, sweep them and decorate them with flowers and offerings, and usually have a happy picnic there, in the company of their departed loved ones. 

The essence in all of these traditions is remembrance.  By thinking on our beloved dead, we reconnect with them, find joy in the good times shared, and note our own impermanence and the shortness of even a long life.  Remembering the dead is one of the ways we keep them in our hearts with us. 

I invite all of us today to take at least 10-15 minutes just to remember our family members and friends who have died: bring to your mind scenes that you recall, happy or painful.  Remember the details of those scenes:  the smells and sounds, the tastes, and how things felt. 

I promise you will find the practice worth the time: bringing to mind our loved ones is a way of processing grief, but also a way of reconnecting with joy and love. 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+