Our Commemoration of All Souls is an opportunity to remember and pray for all the faithful departed: our deceased family and friends, and “all the faithful departed who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.”
On this day, and very often during the holiday season that is fast approaching, the spirits of these departed loved ones seem to hover particularly close to us. Our memories just seem to be filled with images of these dear ones whom we have lost.
And as much as the memories bring back some of the smiles and laughs that were shared in good times, they can also bring back some of the pains that were shared in times of sickness and loss, and they certainly waken the sense of emptiness we feel at their not being here among us.
Whenever we feel this ache of loss, or feel the helplessness of accompanying a loved one through suffering, or stand vigil as someone dies, we come face to face with our own human frailty and are left standing before a holy mystery, searching for a good word to speak.
As we all know, all to well, words seem to fail us at those moments. No word seems capable of capturing our emotion or of healing our loss.
At times like these there is really only one Word for us to speak: we speak the Word that hates death even more than we do.
As Saint Paul describes it, we speak the Word that became flesh, and suffered, and died, and rose to life again precisely so that we, the living and the dead, might belong to Him, and that we might have a share in His life which is more powerful than any sin or death.
When we have the faith and courage to utter, either through our voice or through our actions, that eternal Word, then we have spoken the only Word that makes any sense whatsoever – the only Word that so loves life, that so genuinely acknowledges the dignity of the human person that it sanctifies the moment of death and transforms it into the instant of re-birth.
As we pray for our all of our departed loved ones, for those many souls around the world who been victims of a culture of death, and for those who are dying this very day, let us proclaim with hope and confidence the Word that lives to die no more.
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