The Commemoration of All Souls November 2, 2018
Fr. Albert St. Peter’s, New Iberia
Memento Mori. Since the middle ages, the Church has used this simple Latin phrase to urge us to remember our mortality. “Remember death” is a sound piece of advice to anyone who would like to become wise, and perhaps counterintuitively, to anyone who would like to find happiness.
Yes, remembering death helps us to find happiness. How? Because it gives us perspective. Because knowing that you will die helps you to appreciate the time you have. Knowing that you will face judgment helps you to avoid sin and choose what is right, which in turns is what makes us happy. Even the secular sciences of psychology and economics have shown that “reminders of death led to enhanced evaluations of life.”
That is largely what today is about. Yesterday we rejoiced, we celebrated, we feasted because we know heaven is real that people go there. Today we are somber, we are prayerful, and we even experience a healthy fear because we know that death is real and is in fact a requirement if we are to go to heaven.
And yet, by itself, death is not actually a good thing. In a certain sense, it is unnatural for human beings, for us creatures who were originally meant to live forever with God. Indeed, death is not the only inevitability about our life. Death brings with it a judgment before which no man or woman can trust their own merits, their own power to prove themselves just. Memento Mori shows us the preciousness of life and the dangers of sin.
But we do not recall death to be morbid. We do not recall judgment to invite despair. We recall not only our own death and the death of those we love, but also the freely chosen death of the one man who actually had the power to it forever, Jesus Christ the God-Man. As Paul tells the Romans in our second reading “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.” We must recall our own death often, but never by itself. Always we recall our death as united to his.
In fact, you’ve already been united to that sacred death in your baptism. Yesterday I told you your baptism meant you made a solemn oath to become a saint. Today I remind you that your baptism means a solemn oath to die with Christ to sin and the world.
As Paul has said, “we know that our old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin.” If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” That dying with Christ is not just the one time we were baptized, but a way of life each moment of each day. And we often fail at it. The men, the women, the children who have gone before us often failed in this way as well.
And so we move from the merely remembering aspect of this day to the responsibility it imposes upon us: prayer and sacrifice for those who have died. Purgatory is real. Even the ancient writers of the Old Testament book of Wisdom sensed that we must be purified in order to enter God’s presence. This text tells us that even the righteous who have died are “chastised,” meaning they are punished and disciplined, but is only so that the can “be greatly blessed.”
It is possible to accept that chastisement in this life. It is possible to be prepared for that great blessing before we die. In fact, that is supposed to be the plan. That is why memento mori is so valuable; it keeps us conscious of the need to act now.
Like yesterday, however, I must also point out that you and I cannot purify ourselves, cannot make ourselves ready for heaven. Death still has power over us, but “we know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him.” And his power is available to us through grace. His power makes possible the gift of purgatory, which is the last sign of mercy that God does not abandon even those who should have gotten it right before they died.
His power over death is available to us now. It is the life of grace. The gift of eternal life actually begins here. The mission from yesterday – to become a saint – fits perfectly with the mission of today: to learn from our mortality. And one key part of that mission of life is to live out our love for one another, living or dead. We cannot know if our loved ones completed their preparation here, so we always pray for them. We offer fasts and sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of the Mass, that they complete their holy chastisement and so be ready to welcome us to heaven when our time comes.
Jesus says, “this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day.” So, remember death, but never forget the resurrection.