All Souls - November 2, 2003

            The Gospel reading for All Saints, the great feast we celebrated yesterday, is interesting in what it so sharply reminds us of.  It is from the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew, where it speaks of those who are blessed.  This road to blessedness is no easy road, then, but blessed are they who nevertheless travel on it.   For at the end of it is sainthood. 

            And here we are, all of us.  We are on this road called life.  We Catholics know that there are many things about our Faith that keep us from traveling an easy road.  But then most of the good things in this life are not easily attained.  So it shouldn’t surprise us that sanctity, and the steep path of morality and virtue that leads to it, is a difficult thing to attain in many ways. 

            But there are the Saints, supremely Our Lady, to encourage us on our way and reassure us that the life, the everlasting life of blessedness, that they even now enjoy is certainly attainable then by us.  And the saints help us along our way by just being there to point out the way by example, but also in a very real way to pray for us to attain that for which we were made, God, heaven, and that which alone will ultimately satisfy us.

            So we are helped.  But we are also called upon to help.  To help those who have gone on before us through the door of death, those who have died in the friendship of God but who lack that sanctity of those in God’s very presence.  The Souls of the faithful departed in Purgatory, that anteroom of heaven, where all that stand between a person and his or her God, all that yet tarnishes a soul, all that is unreconciled with God the Father, have yet to be dealt with. 

            The great lay theologian C. S. Lewis once remarked that even though he was not a Roman Catholic, he still believed in Purgatory.  He wrote that he, in fact, had a lively hope in the reality of that place or state of being purified.  For, he explained, no one in his right mind would want to appear straightway in God’s presence with the smudge that I have on my life.  No thank you, I’ll take purgatory any day.

            So there is great sense in this teaching of the Church.  And a great and grave obligation.  As the Saints in heaven commit themselves to pray for us on life’s journey, so we must pray for those in the final stages of that after-life journey, for those who even now are being purified of all that keeps their soon-to-be vision of God nothing but the purest joy. 

            The great pain of purgatory is a very real thing.  It is the frustration of the person who knows that he is to be saved, that he is to enter the very presence of God the Creator of all things, but who cannot yet enjoy that vision of God which is life itself, the highest joy, the complete fulfillment for all that it means to be a human being created by and for God.  On the very brink of heaven, the soul in Purgatory suffers, really suffers, this deprivation.  But these souls are God’s friends, and so they suffer with the highest hope; and they are comforted by our prayers and helped along the way by our intercession for them.

            In looking at all this, one thing should be clear to us:  the numbing fear of death, for the Christian, has been taken away.  Because of the death of the Son of God and the victory of His resurrection, all that death could muster was spent on Him.  With Christ death itself died in the sense that it has lost it grip of finality upon us.  And in Him, as we read in the letter to the Romans, through our baptism we have been made partakers of Christ’s resurrection because we have also died with him. 

            Death cannot even separate us from our loved ones, those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.  In Christ, in His body the Church, we are still united.  We are one with the Saints in glory; we are one with the souls in Purgatory -- still all belonging to each other, all still united, for we have been joined to Christ through baptism and Eucharist, and so also to each other in Him. 

            So let us not fail those who desire the help of our prayers.  After all they are praying for us, who are farther from our final home than they are.  And in praying for them, not only do we aid and comfort them through a strengthening of our communion with them, but we also do great benefit to ourselves.  For in learning to pray, to give of ourselves for the sake of others, we too draw nearer to the heart of Christ, which is the only way to heaven.