“Remember, Lord, those who have died and have gone before us marked with the sign of faith…”

            This past Wednesday was All Souls Day, the special day to remember the souls of the faithful dead… and a day to remind us of our constant duty to pray all year around for those of our loved ones who have died.  What’s the use of praying for someone after he or she has already died? someone may ask.  There are many answers to that question, all of them consoling. 

            First, such prayer expresses the Church’s teaching that ours, as Christians, is a community of faith that transcends time and space and is not at all broken by death.  We acknowledge this reality in our Sunday Creed when we say, “I believe… in the communion of saints,” a communion that binds the Church together whether in pilgrimage here on earth, moving through the cleansing trial of purgatory or triumphant in heaven.  Secondly, even though someone may have left this world in seeming adversity toward God (who knows, though, the final state of mind before the moment of death, and the marvelous operations of God’s mercy?), to pray for them now is to beseech the mercy and goodness of God who is eternal (absolutely unlimited by time), who does hear, then, someone’s prayer from all eternity (though uttered in time) and actively answers that prayer, as it were, “retroactively.”  And third, such a fulfillment of our obligation to pray for the dead is an act of charity that can, and does, have the effects in our own lives and souls that charity brings; it can change us through the workings of God’s grace in us so that we too are then more and more prepared to face with courage and peace our own mortality, and know that death itself has been stripped of its power by the death and resurrection of Christ, in whom, by God’s grace, we live and have eternal life. 

            Again this year for the whole month of November, our parish Book of the Dead has been placed in the entrance of the church.  I encourage you to inscribe the name(s) of your departed loved ones, who will, then, be remembered by intention at all the Masses offered during November.

Autumn…and the Resurrection of the Body

            This past Tuesday a priest friend and I took a short hike up Standing Indian Trail.  We stopped and had lunch on some rocks protruding out into the flowing creek and talked.  After a bit my friend hiked downstream by himself so that he could fly fish back upstream, and I was left alone with a couple of books, sitting in the bright autumn sun that warmed me from above, even as the cold rocks beneath me reminded me that it was no longer summer.  In the quietness, broken only by the sound of the water and the clicking noise of dried, brown leaves falling in the woods behind me, I thought about how I have always liked this season best. 

            Autumn has been described as a kind of melancholy season, but for me it is hardly so.  After all, it’s also the season of the harvest, the time of the year of the winepress and Octoberfest, of Halloween and All Saints Day.  There is nothing really melancholic about football either!  But this season does have a certain gravitas about it, as well it should, for it does signal quite seriously something to us of real importance:  the reality of the impermanence of things.  Things come to a fruition, a kind of climax, and then begin to fade away.  Nature itself paints before us this reality with those brushstrokes of amber, yellow and deep red of the leaves as they turn color and reach a certain splendor… just before they start to die and succumb to gravity, leaving most of the trees spindly and nearly bare.      

            And so there’s winter, when the sap runs low, and a blanket of hibernation lies across the land.  One could, with shortened sight, only recount sadly the loss.  But for the one who would use his eyes, he notices in the “bleakness” that he can now, all along the trail, see very much farther; the passing away of things, noticed by the attentive, clears the landscape and enlarges the vision. 

            Autumn means, every year, a marvelous display of the beauty of God’s world.  But it also points irrevocably to winter.  Those who refuse to peer beyond the short-lived fanfare of color will not see very far.  Winter has its purposes too:  for one thing to remind us – by the means of something “programmed” in the creation itself – that this world, as St. Paul wrote so solemnly, “is passing away.” 

            Here we could end with some sort of noble stoicism, I suppose.  But the Christian goes much further.  He also takes delight in spring and summer, seasons that convey the rest of the story.  And it is precisely here that I have often been made aware of the deepest warning – that I not be like the five foolish virgins, ill-prepared for the end and so lose out on that Spring – the Resurrection of the Body (proclaimed in the Apostles Creed) – for which we were all made; to never, in the end, have the restored means to taste, smell, hear, see and touch the sweet bounty of God’s handiwork, perfected and glorified in heaven.  And far more, infinitely more:  to never know the unspeakable joy of seeing the Source, Him who is Beauty Himself, of every good thing.  This is that healthy fear of damnation that would help save us, the reverent fear of losing eternally all that the revolving seasons in the wonder of this temporary world would teach us, so much clarified and heightened now by the message of the Gospel – the promise of eternal life to all those who love God and long for His appearing, who without blinkered eyes catch a glimpse of God in His handiwork, seek to gaze knowingly at His full self-disclosure in the face of Christ, and have the assurance, then, that He will not turn away the ones who have prepared for His coming.