A Homily for the Solemnity of All Souls
Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9 Romans 6:3-9 John 6:37-40
American grain prices soared after the First World War as the United States fed a devastated Europe. Midwestern land values also took off, and my maternal great-grandfather made a decidedly progressive decision about the inheritance of his estate. The farm would be left to his only son, with the proviso that, five years after he had inherited it, a portion of it would be sold so that his sisters would receive half of the 1920s value of the land in cash.
Sadly, that provision came due at the height of the Great Depression when land values had collapsed. The entire farm was sold, and the sisters did not receive what my great-grandfather had intended. He certainly had not planned that his son would lose the farm.
I remember a grandfather who drank too much when we visited. He once famously fell into the Christmas tree. Only in my adulthood did my mother, who grew up in the household, speak of how different my grandfather had been before he had lost the farm and was subsequently disabled by Type 1 diabetes. Her older siblings had had a very different father than the younger ones.
I also wonder how different my own childhood would have been if my easily exasperated mother had come of age before the farm was lost, if she had been allowed to go to high school when she finished the eighth grade rather than to work.
A very modern, and very wrong, picture of our humanity keeps us from understanding the significance of All Souls’ Day. We think of the human person as essentially independent, isolated within the self. There are two problems with this picture.
Here is the first. There has never been an “I” without a “you.” We become ourselves through our interactions with others. That essential relatedness begins long before our births and never ends, even in death. I never met my great-grandfather. I admire his intention, and I still live with its consequences, a full century later.
But that is only one strand of who I am. If one were to pull out all the threads that others have woven, there would be nothing left of me. The same is true of the tapestry you call yourself.
The second problem with our modern conception of self is that we fail to see that we never finish weaving ourselves. For as long as we live, even from our deathbeds, we strive to pull together projects and relationships. We die unfinished. We enter the kingdom in tatters, fragments of self.
All Souls Day is premised upon purgatory, a process that stands outside of space and time. Best to picture it as a process, not a place or a legal sentence.
In his mercy, God gathers up our fragments of self. He heals our wounds and brings the work we began—in him, always in him—to completion.
And this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day (Jn 6:39)
If others are necessarily involved in the very creation of ourselves, how or why should their influence end at death?
We wound each other in life, but we also heal each other. We pray for each other in life, knowing that God is the immense, invisible ground of each of us. Why would God repudiate in the next life what he took such pains to fashion in this one? No, we remain human souls essentially bound to, composed by, our interaction with others.
For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his,
we shall also be united with him in the resurrection (Rom 6:5).
If we enter death in tatters, which God must heal and weave together, why should our prayers for each other cease? We pray for the work that must be done after death just as we did before. And the dead, who know that their salvation is assured in Christ, continue to pray for us.
Those who trust in him shall understand truth,
and the faithful shall abide with him in love:
because grace and mercy are with his holy ones,
and his care is with his elect (Wis 3:9).
Prayer is the great recognition that we are not God, that we are not whole and complete within ourselves. We must implore our creator, our origin, not to abandon us but to accompany us. We pray as well for those countless souls who, quite simply, are our destiny, our completion. Why on earth, or in heaven, would one suppose that prayer, spiritual communion, should cease with death? We have only left this earth, not our fundamental rootedness in God and each other.
