A Reflection for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed
Find today’s readings here.
“If, then, we have died with Christ,
we believe that we shall also live with him.
We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more;
death no longer has power over him.”
Pope St. John Paul II famously proclaimed in a 1986 Angelus address in Australia, paraphrasing St. Augustine, that “we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song!” Can this really be the case all year round? These Alleluias might be easy to summon during the Sprinkling Rite at the Easter Vigil, but what about during this more drab moment of the year, as (at least in my home in the northeastern United States) the skies turn gray, the trees turn to skeletons and the church asks us to turn our thoughts to death?
My main takeaway from today’s feast is that the Resurrection, the miracle of Easter, may be even more important to our spiritual lives in ostensibly “ordinary” time than it is on Easter Sunday or during the Triduum. What exactly is the Resurrection for? It’s certainly not something to celebrate once per year and then file away until Easter returns. To be an Easter people is to carry the grace and the reassurance of Jesus’ victory over death through the entire liturgical year, from the joy of Christmas to the solemnity of Lent and at every moment in between—especially today, as we remember those who have gone to God before us.
The Resurrection is at its most meaningful when the focus of our prayer turns to death. Jesus came into the world not only to heal the sick, bring freedom to captives and minister to the vulnerable, but to have the final word over death itself. Most of us have heard St. Paul’s words in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain.”
This is one of the most important promises of our Catholic faith: The dead have not ceased to exist. If we can believe in God, and in the plane of reality—heaven—that exists above the world we can observe with our rational senses, it is but a small leap to believe that the souls who leave this plane live on in the next.
The bridge between these two planes is, of course, Jesus. Through his incarnation, he crossed the barrier between God’s kingdom and our mortal coil, subverting this separation through his dual nature as both God and man. And through his death and resurrection, he taught us that our own deaths are not the end of our existence. Our being does not vanish when we die; instead, we pass from an already rich life on earth to a fuller one with God. As Paul says in today’s excerpt from his letter to the Romans, “If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” In his crucifixion and return from the dead, Jesus leads the way for us. We can be an Easter people even in the most tragic days of our lives, even in the midst of painful losses of loved ones, if we take to heart this central truth of our faith.
Even as we confront our own mortality and—far more difficult, in my view—the prospect of losing others we love, we can cry out a bold, confident “Alleluia!” in light of the hope that we and our loved ones will live on in union with God. Today’s commemoration might make little sense without Easter, but what profound meaning the knowledge of the Resurrection brings to it. The dead have departed, not disappeared; they have embarked on a journey between worlds similar to that of Jesus.
