All Saints 2014
November has been called the kindest month, because it is the month in which we remember. All Saints is followed by All Souls, by Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, and we can even throw in Bonfire Night for good measure: Remember, remember, the fifth of November... Indeed the whole month is given up to remembering, and to praying for, those who have gone before us.
Is this simply an exercise in nostalgia or, to put it more kindly, in entertaining good thoughts, or is there something here of greater importance? To remember is, literally, to re-member, to put the members, or limbs, back together, and that is what the Church invites us to do, at all times of the year, but especially in this, the year’s penultimate month.
We are, as St. Paul impressed upon us, members, or limbs, of Christ’s body, the Church; and not only we, but all those who have gone before us, throughout the ages and throughout the world, members of Christ and of one another, joined in a unity which cannot be severed even by death. When we remember, we consciously reunite ourselves with one another, and especially with the dead, who are alive to God and to us, and that reuniting has its positive, practical effect in prayer, as we seek the prayers of our departed fellow-members, and we offer effective prayer for them, that their unity with God, their perfection as members of Christ, may be complete.
And so our prayer is the active, vital, positive part of our re-membering, strengthening us as the body of Christ, building more firmly our unity with the world-wide, time-wide, eternity-wide Church, reinforcing our mutual support.
By holding two separate feasts of All Saints and All Souls, we distinguish those whose need for perfection to bring them into complete unity with God is complete—the saints—from those whom we call the Holy Souls, for whom that perfection is still a work in progress; yet in reality, the two feasts are part of one whole. Whilst there are some whom the Church has officially named as saints, for the vast majority of the dead we cannot know exactly how they stand before God. In any case, the question is an artificial one, brought on by our tendency always to think in terms of time, and to view eternity as a long, long, ever-so-long time, whereas it is a different dimension altogether.
What is clear, both from the scriptures, and from our own experience, reason, and logic, is that everyone who has ever lived, with the exception of Jesus Our Lord, and of His Blessed Mother, who was preserved by His merits from every stain of sin—everyone else has needed/needs/will need that cleansing, perfecting, purifying which we call purgatory, and therefore both needs and offers to us that beautiful gift of mutual support which is prayer.
If we were in any doubt about that, today’s Second Reading should banish those doubts. “What we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed” says St. John. “All we know is that, when it is revealed, we shall be like God, because we shall see Him as He really is.”
To see God as He really is: what an awesome experience that will be, at once both glorious and terrifying. What effect will that have on us? It will make us like God, says St. John. Are you like God? Are you heck as like, any more than I am. Well, perhaps a bit more than I am, but still not like God. How will we become like God? By a change so drastic, so dramatic, so mind-boggling, that we cannot even begin to imagine it. What is the one thing which we know about change? That it is painful. Birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, midlife, old age, death: none of these changes takes place without pain—we even have a saying “No pain, no gain”—so the change to become like God will inevitably bring the sharpest pain of all, and that pain will be purgatory, our purging, our purifying, our perfecting, a pain which will nonetheless be welcome, because we shall already have seen our glorious goal. As the late Fr. Vincent Smith put it: “Purgatory will be seeing God, and realising that we are not fit to be seen”.
What form that purgatory will take, nobody knows, as St. John points out. The lurid pictures conjured up in the Middle Ages, which caused some of the more extreme Reformers to throw out the baby of Purgatory with the bath water of the imagery, were simply an attempt to picture the unpictureable, to give the mind something to hold onto. Nor does it matter. What truly matters is our unity in the one body with all those who have gone before us, and our concern for mutual support, as we seek the helping prayers of the saints and Holy Souls, without worrying too much about who falls into which category, and offer the help of our prayers. Thus our remembering becomes truly a re-membering, and November is genuinely the kindest month.
