A Homily for All Souls' Day (2022)

 

A Homily for All Souls’ Day

For dear friends at the Rogue Valley Manor  

Nov. 2, 2022

Celebrating mass in black and gold vestments. 

 

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)

All Souls

--May Sarton

 

Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
not the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited--
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.

 

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 siblings, brothers and sisters and all, 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.” 

 

Several years ago, after the All Hallows' Eve Liturgy at Trinity Ashland, my wife  Elena and I went home to a beautiful Halloween night sky with stars and bright puffy clouds scudding by, shining bright and backlit by the nearly full moon.  After all those assurances in the liturgy against ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, and all those prayers for a peaceful and restful night, Elena had a terrible nightmare that woke both of us up at 3 a.m.   When we were younger, I was the one with terrible nightmares, and she was the one who by comforting and cuddling, helped me back to sleep.  Now it was my turn to play the role of a great warm teddy bear helping her get back to sleep. 

 

When I am asked about All Saints’ and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, and the commemoration of All Souls’ and prayers for the dead, I think of the role of comforting one’s bedmate to help them sleep.  In night-time darkness when nightmares come, we are there for each other.  The blessed departed, who prayed in life and most certainly continue to pray in death, are there for us.   They are not just a “great cloud of witnesses” in the arena seating cheering us on.  They actively work on our behalf, and give us strength, if only by their examples.  The great multitude of the rest of the dead—well, we pray for them, and by our prayers, hopefully help work God’s mercy in them.   

 

We also are the hands and hearts of the blessed departed here below. 

 

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 aredifferent 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.  Mexicans make ofrendas with pictures of the departed, tissue paper cutouts of hope, and sugar skulls expressing the sweetness there is even in death, as well as the glorious marigold garlands and pathways encouraging the souls of our beloved to come back to us if only for a night.   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+