A Reflection for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)
Find today’s readings here.
As I age, I know more and more people who are dead. Every anniversary, my husband and I pull out our wedding photos, and lately we feel a bit mortal as we note the many wedding guests from 43 years ago who have since died. My grandmother had the morbid habit of drawing a stark ‘X’ through people’s faces in her photo albums when they died. We aren’t there yet.
But on All Souls Day, I feel the spirits of my beloved dead all around me. Every year I make an altar for them, not a beautiful ofrenda like some of my friends erect, with favorite refreshments and painted skulls and strings of marigolds, but a little table with candles lighting the holy cards and handouts from the funerals I’ve attended. I prop up their smiling faces. I’m happy to see them. I pray with them. I sit with them: my dad, my mom, my niece, my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who have gone forth from us. Some of them died at a ripe old age. But some deaths have felt like “utter destruction,” as Wisdom 3:3 describes it, those loved ones who died too soon, too young, too tragically, too incomprehensibly.
All Souls Day reminds us that life does not end with our corporeal demise, but rather changes into something eternal and holy and full of grace and mercy: the communion of saints
My heart holds great hunks of grief for them. When the psalmist writes “My cup overflows,” I know it’s meant in a good way, but I identify with that feeling of spillage. My cup is sometimes too small for the ache that overflows it. “But they are in peace,” Wisdom assures us, and I do believe that of my beloved dead. I sense their peace. All Souls Day, or the annual Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, reminds us that life does not end with our corporeal demise, but rather changes into something eternal and holy and full of grace and mercy: the communion of saints. I hear the poetry of today’s readings:
As gold in the furnace.
As sparks through stubble.
He refreshes my soul.
I shall dwell in the house of the Lord.
Live in newness with him.
Grown into union with him.
I will not reject anyone who comes to me.
I shall raise him on the last day.
The readings brim with images and promises for the afterlife, for the moment we will dwell with our loving God. I still can’t imagine what that is, what that looks like, or what that feels like. None of us can. I’m just grateful that someday I will know as my photo may be added to someone else’s little table, a joyful soul among all joyful souls.
