ALL SOULS DAY

Today, we remember all our ‘faithful departed’. Most of us will be remembering people we have known and loved, such as family members and good friends. Indeed, the whole month of November is a time when we remember our dead in a special way. As Christians, our remembering of those who have died is always prayerful remembering. We remember them before the Lord. Remembering our departed loved ones before the Lord and praying for them is one of the ways that we give expression to our continuing communion with them in the Lord. Today is the day when we give expression to what we refer to in the creed as ‘the communion of saints’. We believe that there is a deep, spiritual communion between those of us who are still on our pilgrim way and those who have come to the end of their pilgrim journey.

 We believe that our loved ones who have died are with the Lord, who is with us in this life until the end of time. As one of the saints expressed it, our loved ones who have died have gone no further than the Lord, and the Lord is always near to us. It is that shared relationship with the Lord which keeps us in communion with our loved ones who have died. In praying for our loved ones today, we are asking the Lord to bring them to the fullness of his risen life.

As the funeral liturgy of the church states, ‘all the ties of love and affection that knit us together in this life do not unravel with death’. Saint Paul puts it more simply in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘love never ends’. One of the ways we expressed our communion with our loved ones before they died was by praying for them. If we are people of faith, we will always pray for those who are significant to us; we might light a candle for them. Just as our love for our loved ones does not cease when they die, neither does our praying for them cease because it is one expression of our enduring love for them.

A traditional prayer we often pray for those who have died is ‘eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them’. We can often think of rest as something passive, the absence of activity. In the Scriptures, ‘rest’ has a much more vibrant meaning, as is suggested by that lovely psalm that is often prayed at a funeral, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. Towards the end of that psalm, we read, ‘Near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirits’. Restful waters or rest is associated with a revival of our spirits. Eternal rest is an eternal revival of our deepest spirit, our deepest self. One of the early saints of the church, Saint Ephrem, wrote, ‘in the kingdom, our departed ones achieve their full stature’. When we pray that God would give our departed loved ones eternal rest, we are praying that their best self would be fully revived that they would attain their full stature as people made in God’s image. The invitation of Jesus, ‘Come to me’, and his promise, ‘I will give you rest’, suggests that already in this earthly life we can begin to enter into this rest, this revival of our drooping spirit. We are in need of the Lord’s gift of rest in these days when our spirits can easily droop. We have the Lord’s assurance there in the gospel reading that if we come to him, if we turn to him, we will indeed experience a foretaste of that eternal rest or revival that awaits us beyond death. Today, as we entrust our loved ones who passed away from us to our loving God, let us ask that they may soon see the full glory of God and, once they are in God’s presence, remember us and intercede for us.