Month of the Holy Souls

November

I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to post anything last week; I got caught up in a number of projects here that needed urgent attention. A few weeks ago I volunteered to type a short history of the diocese written by a local educator that will be published in conjunction with the Silver Jubilee celebration next month. Bishop Akio also asked me to help him with an administrative matter with an impending deadline. In addition to that there were some personal things I had to take care of, and I left on Friday to visit the village of Isohe, about three hours away. I hope to do a separate posting about that visit soon.

November is the month of the Holy Souls. We start it off by contemplating the saints in glory on November 1, but beginning on the 2nd and continuing through the rest of the month, we touch on something closer to home: the souls of our loved ones who are in the process of purification and preparation for entrance into that glory that takes place in Purgatory. It is a time of year, at least in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere, that naturally lends itself to thinking about death, and in that sense it’s a kind of extended prelude to Easter. Thomas Hood (1789-1845) captures the mood of the month very memorably in his poem, No!:

"No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--…

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!"

Bodies, Blood and Earth

Celebrating All Souls Day and observing the month of the Holy Souls in Sudan really provokes some reflection. More than two million people died in the twenty year course of the civil war. Torit itself was the site of many deaths from violence during the warfare, and from starvation when it was under siege. Typing the history of the diocese, which recounts the experiences lived by the Church here in Torit, left a deep impression of how horrific that ordeal was. The earth of Southern Sudan is filled with graves and its soil is soaked with the blood of those who died. I was reminded of the words of Genesis that remind us that we were taken from the soil of the earth, and to it we will return someday (3:7,19), and of how the earth soaked in the blood of Abel who was killed by his brother Cain (4:10-11), as well as of a reflection on the Fourteenth Station of the Cross by Pope John Paul II in 2003:

“From the moment when man, as a result of sin, was driven away from the Tree of Life (cf. Gen 3:23-24), the earth became a burial ground. With as many burial places as there are men. A great planet of tombs. Close to Calvary there was a tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea (cf. Mt 27:60). In it, with Joseph's consent, the body of Jesus was placed after being taken down from the Cross (cf. Mk 15:42-46 ff.). They laid it there in haste, so that the burial might be completed before the feast of Passover (cf. Jn 19:31), which began at sunset. In one of the countless tombs scattered all over the continents of this planet of ours the Son of God, the man Jesus Christ, conquered death with death… Though our planet is constantly being filled with fresh tombs, though the cemetery in which man, who comes from dust and returns to dust (cf. Gen 3:19), is always growing, nonetheless all who gaze upon the tomb of Jesus Christ live in the hope of the Resurrection.”

On my previous visit to Sudan in June of this year, walking along the road and gazing at the beauty of the mountains and surrounding scenery, I was suddenly struck by the realization that the earth, so beautiful and beloved by God, was also somehow redeemed by the blood of Christ with which it was soaked during His Passion. Somehow the very soil was sanctified and consecrated by the Precious Blood it absorbed – that blood of Jesus that cries out more forcefully for mercy than the blood of Abel did for vengeance (cf. Heb 1`2:24). And so here in Sudan, somehow, mysteriously, the blood of those who died hand are buried here, is mingled with the Blood of Christ in the common soil which received them both. Our bodies, too, formed of earth, drink in and absorb that same Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and when they are buried it becomes the pledge of future resurrection: “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

A Few Thoughts about Death

Often death is thought of as a cessation, when I believe that from a Christian point of view it’s much more of a consummation. Our lives are not simply a space of time in which to enjoy ourselves and then call it quits. Rather, they are an ongoing project with a goal and a destination. Recently in the Gospel for daily Mass Jesus used the example of someone who sets out to build a tower (Lk 14:28-30) – not a bad image for us to use to understand the process of constructing our lives. Perhaps Purgatory can be understood then as the “place” in which the work leftover after death is completed, and the mistakes in construction repaired.

From this point of view, then, death becomes the supreme moment in life, when everything is summed up, the grand finale – so to speak, the final bow before the curtain comes down on the drama. The title character in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour – a French missionary in the American Southwest, states it well as he enters into his final illness: “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

From a different perspective though, death resembles another biblical image used by Jesus: the eye of a needle (cf. Mk 10:25). At the end of the same Gospel passage that speaks of the tower mentioned above, Jesus concludes flatly: “Anyone who does not give up all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:33). That’s pretty all encompassing. Other translations render it “all his possessions,” or “all that he posseses.” Death is that very narrow opening into eternal life that only the naked soul, only the mysterious spiritual reality of the person can enter through. We cannot bring along money or possessions, other people or even our own bodies – all things to which we cling so possessively, in which we invest so much energy and attention and with which we tend to identify our worth. It is the way in which our detachment and discipleship becomes complete – something to keep in mind as we prepare for and move toward that passage ourselves.

The Last Word on Purgatory: Pope Benedict XVI

I would like to conclude by quoting the stirring words of Pope Benedict XVI on Purgatory near the end of his recent encyclical Spe Salvi. The citation is a little long, but well worth reading, and exceptionally apropos for this month:

46. Yet we know from experience that neither case [people who have totally destroyed their capacity for love and truth, and those who are utterly pure and completely united to God and open to others] is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil —much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12-15)...

47. Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion. At the moment of judgement we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy. It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart's time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ…

48. A further point must be mentioned here, because it is important for the practice of Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the idea that one can help the deceased in their intermediate state through prayer (see for example 2 Macc 12:38-45; first century BC). The equivalent practice was readily adopted by Christians and is common to the Eastern and Western Church… The souls of the departed can, however, receive “solace and refreshment” through the Eucharist, prayer and almsgiving. The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitude or even a request for pardon? Now a further question arises: if “Purgatory” is simply purification through fire in the encounter with the Lord, Judge and Saviour, how can a third person intervene, even if he or she is particularly close to the other? When we ask such a question, we should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other—my prayer for him—can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God's time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain.