I have to begin by saying that this is, as far as I can tell, the first time I have ever preached a normal homily on All Souls’ Day, because it is the first time I have ever observed it on a Sunday. It is a strange experience, if, at least, you treat All Souls as what it has always been: a day of prayer for the dead.
Some of our separated brethren, in a misguided appropriation of the November devotions, often conflate All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, basically making it a time to throw Grandma into the same category as Our Lady and just make a generic celebration of everything of the past without remembering the Church’s most basic intuition that there are some in glory who can pray for us, and there are many others for whom we are bound to pray. Unfortunately, I think many celebrations of All Souls in the modern Roman Rite, like funeral liturgies in the same, with white vestments and without all the hard old prayers like the Dies Irae, add to this confusion.
Some years ago, Pope Benedict lamented that the revised propers for the dead in the new missal seem to have expunged every reference to the soul. One priest is certainly not going to fix all this by complaining in a homily, but I bring it up because it is something of a scandalous elephant in the room, and even in places where all the old rites are observed—the sequence for the dead, the long old propers, the rite of absolution, and so on—we have a long road ahead of us to reclaim an authentically Catholic understanding of death, which would be the same thing as having an authentically Catholic understanding of the body.
This is, to put it mildly, a hard sell in our culture, because it would require us to accept that to be human means not unbounded freedom, but specifically a freedom limited by the givenness of the body. Death is both a mercy and a penalty, a further limit, and the temporary separation of body and soul requires a confrontation with these limits.
Part of the death-denial of our culture is that favorite trope wherein the mourning loved one gazes on the body in the coffin, declaring with confidence, “That’s not really Grandpa! He’s gone.” But this is a lie, even while it tells something partly true, because we really are our bodies, so the separation of death is no small thing, but a real crisis of human identity. We can speak of an enduring human identity—that is, the soul—only insofar as somehow the entirety of human existence is held in the memory of God who alone gives us being. So although the saints in heaven, the souls in purgatory, and the souls in hell are all really alive in God, their state is temporary until the resurrection, and we know very little about what these things are like apart from the bare bones of Catholic teaching and the occasional speculative vision from history.
A lot of Christians think of reality as a three-story building—the main floor is where we are, hell is something below us, heaven is above. And even if most Christians don’t believe that hell is literally underneath the ground, or heaven is up above the clouds, the way we think about them tends to rely on these spatial analogies. But in fact the formal teaching on heaven and hell is quite simple: heaven is where God is most present; hell is where God is most absent. But when you put it this way, things get confusing, because Christians are supposed to believe that God is everywhere. Does it mean that heaven and hell are just a state of mind
Not exactly. C.S. Lewis suggests in his wonderful book, The Great Divorce that hell is a state of mind—using one’s own mind as a prison—whereas heaven is reality itself. In other words, heaven and hell are not equals, just as God and the devil are not equals. Think of heaven as a beautiful open country with fields and mountains and forests, teeming with life and beauty. And if that wonderful place is heaven, hell is the shadow under a pebble under a blade of grass. You can live under that pebble if you want. You can convince yourself that it is the best place to be. But to live there, you have to become very small, very shadowy, and less and less like yourself, more and more subject to the tortures and cold and darkness of your own choice.
That vision from Lewis is incomplete, of course, especially when it comes to the role of the resurrected body, not to mention the way that God names and confirms our judgment after death. But it is still a helpful picture. The saints, whom we celebrated on All Saints’ Day yesterday, are the people who already live in the heavenly country. Some of them we know well, because we have a relationship with them and because they have in visible signs shown us their direct participation in the vision of God. Some of them we do not know at all, and that’s no surprise, because how could Holy Church, even with her supernatural gifts, ever presume to exhaustively catalogue the courts of heaven?
The “all souls” we remember today are everybody else. And just as we don’t really know everyone who’s definitely one of the saints, we don’t really know for sure who isn’t. This is why we pray: because we don’t let our ignorance of the afterlife stop us from loving those we love.
When Christians pray for the dead, we pray, in effect, that the people we know and remember will end up, hopefully with us, in that heavenly country. We don’t know how this works. Not really.
There are quite a few Christians, especially since the Reformation, who think it’s a bad idea to pray for the dead because we don’t know for sure what it accomplishes or how. This is just about the worst reason I can think of in the world. I don’t know exactly what it accomplishes for me to kiss my child. But sometimes we do things not because they’re useful, but because they’re good. And Holy Church does, in the end, assure us that, whatever the mechanics of purgatory, these prayers are both good and useful. Just as with the living, we know that prayer works. The fact that the working of prayer is a mystery should not prevent us from doing it.
Whereas All Saints’ Day is a celebration, All Souls’ Day is a general funeral for all our dead. It is sad, because death is sad. It is not a “celebration of life” or any other such nonsense. Even when it’s a good death, and when the family gather and share their love and their memories, it’s still sad. And what the Church offers in the All Souls’ requiem is a place to channel those feelings into prayer, to commend our friends and our family to God, not as a gesture of usefulness, but as a gesture of love. Love and hope—hope that in his mercy, God will bring us together at the Last Day in the place where he reigns in glory.
That personal hope is never very far from our prayers for the dead. Two of the more prolix parts of the traditional funeral rites, the Dies Irae and the Libera Me, speak in the first person, summing up, perhaps, the prayers of the faithful for their own deliverance. For example, in the Dies Irae we pray,
Through the sinful woman shriven,
Through the dying thief forgiven,
Thou to me a hope hast given.
Despite all the language of hell, and punishment, and undying fires, and realms of darkness, these classic texts center on hope. Real hope requires a sober awareness of our situation! But the knowledge of these things grounds us more fully in the incredible grace and mercy of God, who pours out his gifts to us without measure. Because of that grace and mercy, we can wait a moment in the darkness of Good Friday with our beloved dead, waiting with them for the final joy of the resurrection.