All Souls' and the flow of love

Yesterday was All Saints Day, and now here we are keeping the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed: All Souls’ Day. Taken together, these two days, when we turn our eyes towards the ones who have gone before us, proclaim two beliefs which lie deep in the heart of our faith:

One is the Christian conviction that life does not end at death: that in the mystery of death life is indeed “changed, but not ended” – to use the words of one of today’s prayers.

The other is that our relationships with one another are also not severed at death. We remain bound to one another, as those who, by the death and Resurrection of Jesus, are bound into the heart of God. The Communion of Saints, the body of Christ, is made up of those on earth, those in heaven, and those on their way from earth to heaven, for whom we particularly pray today: those we love and see no longer. 

We know that love does not end: we know it in our own lives. When someone we care about dies, our love for them doesn’t switch off. It cannot. It continues as a concrete reality, and this, indeed, is the experience of grief – the ongoing love for one we have lost. God’s love is the realest and truest thing in the world, and our love, frail though it may sometimes be, teaches us about the divine, eternal love which is its source. How surely we can trust that God’s love continues for all his children after their death, just as our love for them continues. And his love, which is powerful creative, and salvific, continues to hold them in being. In the beautiful words of Austin Farrer, preaching at the end of the Second World War to a congregation stunned by the enormity of loss they had suffered: “Every soul that has passed out of this visible world, as well as every soul remaining within it, is caught and held in the unwavering beam of divine care.”[1]

This is a mystery indeed, and it asks us to be people of hope. Not a wistful hope, but a hope “full of immortality” grounded in trust of the one who makes promises of eternal life, beyond what we can see, who opens a way for his faithful to abide with him in love: to be made alive in Christ.

We are here today to name those who we love and see no longer - and specifically, to name them at the altar of God.

We are here to pray for them, and by praying, to enact those enduring bonds of love which continue through the veil which separates us for now. We are here to live out our membership in the body of Christ: as those who have been entrusted with the love of God, and with pouring out that love for others – for all others. We are here to pray for those we still mourn sharply, those whose names bring back the ache of grief. And this pain of grief is part of our love for one another: attested to by none less than the Lord himself, who wept at the tomb of his fallen friend Lazarus. We are here to pray, too, for those whose deaths we remember with peace, full of fondness and gratitude for who they were. We pray, too, for those whom we never knew, those whose names are unfamiliar, whose lives were long ago and far distant, and towards whom we still nonetheless bear the responsibility of prayer, and of love, as our brothers and sisters, our fellow members of the Body of Christ.

We bring them here, to the altar of God. To this point of union between heaven and earth, this place from which hope flows like a fountain. It is to this place that we bring our beloved dead. To break bread here is the ultimate way we unite ourselves with those who have gone before us, and we have a glimpse and foretaste of the day when that reunion will be made perfect, when the Body of Christ is gathered together with all of its members in its heavenly fulfillment.

When Saint Monica, the mother of Augustine, knew that she was dying, she and her son spoke at length about the beauties of Paradise to which she was looking forward. And then Monica told Augustine “Lay this body anywhere, and take no trouble over it. One thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be." Monica understood that this is what Christians who love each other do in the face of the separation of death. Part of Christian relationship, Christian friendship,  will always be to pray for each other and with each other.

We remember our beloved dead at the altar of the Lord, because it is in this place that we discover the source of eternal life, the death of death, and the offer of everlasting joy. Here, we are taken to the Cross and to Heaven – in a very concrete way this is where we encounter and glimpse the Resurrection – the glorious transformation of death into life. We bring our beloved dead here.

Thanks be to God for the chance to bring them here, to remember them by name before the one who made them, who loves them and by his love holds them in eternal being, who gave his life for them that they might live forever with him. Amen.

[1] “The Villages of Heaven” preached in All Soul’s Chapel, Oxford, 1939.