The first 2 days of November are days when the Catholic Church encourages us to look at the end game, the bottom line, the end of our lives in the light of faith. Today we celebrate All Saints Day, the celebration of a key article of our faith, as phrased in the Apostles Creed we recite every time we pray the rosary: “I believe . . . in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” And tomorrow, November 2nd we celebrate All Souls Day, the commemoration of all those who have died in the peace of Christ but for whom we still need to pray for their purification.
What do you think happens when we die? In Saturday’s newspaper there was a letter to the editor by a professional medium who helps ghosts cross over to the other side. And there is that TV show called “Medium,” about seeing the dead whose business of life is not yet finished.
All of this is made up. But what is really intriguing is that such talk shows that there is an increasing interest about what happens when we die. What we have to offer, as a 2000 year old people of faith in Jesus Christ, is the truth as defined by the Church whose voice is the voice of Jesus down through the ages.
We believe that in every age since the death and resurrection of Christ there have been those who lived their lives in the same path traced by Jesus and these, the saints, pushed themselves to follow Him as close as humanly possible, always aware of their human limits.
In their earthly existence, in fact, they were poor in spirit, grieved by their sins and by their made up myths; starved and thirsting for justice, merciful, pure of heart, peacemakers, and persecuted for the sake of righteousness.
And we also believe that God himself gave them a share in his own happiness: it was previewed in this world by the way they lived their lives, and, in the hereafter, it is enjoyed in its fullness. They are now consoled; they have indeed inherited the earth; they are sated, pardoned, and see face to face the God whose children they are. In a word: "theirs is the Kingdom of heaven" and they are intercessors in our journey through life. They are the Communion of Saints.
In our busy, workaday lives, we can ask ourselves if we have this same burning desire to “be in their number - when the saints comes marching in”? Or is our nose so close to the grindstone that we do not give much thought to the end game, the bottom line, the end of our days on this earth. If not, today’s feast encourages us to rethink our priorities.
Let's turn now to tomorrow's celebration:
All Souls Day points to the great doctrine of hope for those whose lives were so fixed to the grindstone, so focused on the “now”, that they did not act wisely as the wise virgins. Remember Jesus telling the parable about those who had prepared properly to have enough oil to keep their lamps lit until the Bridegroom came; and the unwise virgins who let their oil run out. The baptized who did not live their lives according to the Beatitudes, and maybe not even by the 10 Commandments, the ones who abandoned the faith, walked a wrong path through life, wasted their lives, and maybe even became a disaster, need not be thought of as lost. There is always hope. But they need our prayers. Why? Because God seems to want us to care about each other, even after death. So, the saints in heaven intercede for us on our pilgrimage through life; and we are called upon to pray for those who lived imperfectly or even disastrously. There is always hope. Think of this process of becoming purified after death as pointed to in our second reading: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.”
Better for us to do our earnest best to live according to the Gospel and not take God’s patience for granted. But thanks be to God for our doctrine of hope, purgatory, that we should never give up on anyone.
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