+ ALL SOULS 2 NOV. 2005
The early Church gave penances for sin to those who were contrite. The Church
felt that it was not enough that sins be forgiven, that there was a penalty for
sin to be paid. Later on there arose a system of indulgences drawn up for the
alleviation of temporal punishment due to sin, which eventually lead to all
kinds of abuses of which the Reformation was very critical. The essential
doctrine of Purgatory was an attempt to lead the faithful to show responsibility
toward the dead and to broaden our awareness of the communion of Saints that was
celebrated yesterday. Death is not the end of life, nor is it the end of our
relationship with loved ones who have died and make up the Body of Christ.
The more recent lost of interest in praying for the dead may be in part due to a
change of emphasis in our spirituality but it may also be due to an
individualistic attitude endemic in our culture that makes it harder to feel
responsibility for, let alone solidarity with, dead relatives and friends. In
our individualism we may find ourselves a lot like the little boy in class when
the teacher asked for a show of hands as to who wanted to go to heaven. All the
hands went up but his. “Don’t you want to go to heaven, Georgie?” the teacher
asked, “Nah, not if that bounce is going there” was his answer. She did not go
on to ask him exactly where he wanted to go. We do well to reclaim our
solidarity with those who have gone before us, to pray for them and be aware of
an ongoing communion with them amid our own busy, daily lives.
The gospel text we just had takes us into just such a sense of solidarity. It
reminds us of just how deeply our lives are related to one another, especially
those we live with day after day. As Christians we are not called into an
occasional act of kindness but into a fundamental openness and vulnerability
toward our neighbor, into a major shift of attitude that allows us to respond to
the hunger, the thirst, the estranged, the naked, the ill or imprisoned that are
all around us. Jesus invites us into the very identification with the poor and
weak that he took on in the mystery of his Incarnation. We will all hear him
say: ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least of my brothers
and sisters, you did for me.” We do this in a superb way when we remember those
who have gone before us, those who are so often out of sight, out of mind.
We don’t know for sure what happens to those who have died, what temporal
punishment due to sin might mean for them but it doesn’t take a lot of
imagination or understanding to realize that a process of purification must take
place in their lives. If they are going to fully embrace gift of divine love
coming to them and this may be nothing more than an incredible longing for its
fulfillment, there must a profound adjustment that takes place. Might we all
have to realize that we had times when Christ was hungry and we did not feed
him, a stranger and we did not welcome him, imprisoned and we did not care for
him? Might we all have to acknowledge those failings and our shortsightedness?
And remembering the dead may well be a means of repairing many of our own
shortcomings.
We are all in some way or other suffering from the “the veil that veils all
peoples, the web that is woven over all nations,” a veil or web that the Lord of
hosts seeks to destroy. After all the greatest hunger, the insatiable thirst,
the most insufferable estrangement, nakedness and illness we all are asked to
endure is the fact that we are not yet fully united with the living God. To be
in solidarity with our neighbor’s need is to come to recognize our own. Every
time we enter deeply into our neighbor’s and our own condition before God in
loving hope, we become a new creation. Our solidarity with one another gives us
the key for it is to have “grown into union with Christ through a death like his
so as to be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Our celebration of the Eucharist pulls us right into this solidarity, reminding
us of how we together form the one Body of Christ. In him we are already one
with all those who have gone before us. What a gift to remember them here at
this altar so as to grow in the awareness of their presence with us.
Wisdom 3:1-9, Romans 5:5-11, John 11:17-27
Michael Casagram, OCSO
Abbey of Gethsemani
November 2, 2005
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