Fr. Alan: November - Prayer for the Faithful departed (2006)
Autumn comes with a vengeance in November. The days shorten, the weather gets colder, there is a sense of the ending of things. Catholic liturgy and teaching reflects this, but always in the light of Christ. Christ is Alpha and Omega (Revelation 22:13), the beginning of all things and their accomplishment.
November begins with All Saints' Day and follows on with All Souls' Day. All Saints' Day sets before us the place to which believers are headed, the heavenly Jerusalem which is the mother of us all, where the Saints, our brothers and sisters, crown the Lord with praise for all eternity. On All Souls' Day the Liturgy encourages us to pray for the dead. To many, this is a strange notion.
In modern culture, death is taboo. This is reflected particularly in an unwillingness to engage with the notion of praying for the dead that they may be forgiven their sins. We seem to think that to impute "sins" to someone who has died is to insult their memory. So we are only permitted to say good things about them. I have actually been accused of "making inappropriate comments" about a dead person in their funeral Mass. My offence had been simply to speak one of the prayers from the Mass for the Dead.
To refuse to engage with the reality of death and to recognise the reality of wrongdoing in our lives is destructive of truth in two ways. First, it deforms our memory of the dead. To pretend that someone has not sinned is untruthful, whether they are alive or dead. The aim of honouring someone's memory is best served by honesty, not by trying to be "nice" about them.
Second, and more importantly, we must neither minimise nor maximise sin. We should not minimise it but recognise that sin disrupts our love of God and neighbour. In life it weakens our will and misshapes our conscience. In death it leaves us with what we might call "unfinished business." But neither should we "overrate" it. With faith in Christ, we must understand that sin is forgiven, that there is no sin that cannot be forgiven, that above all other attributes, God is a loving and compassionate Father who wants us to be freed from sin, even if, for most of us, that process of liberation might be painful.
So it is, in the words of Scripture, a good and holy thought to pray for the dead that they may be forgiven their sins. In fact we do this at every Mass, for (despite what we might think from the tradition of Mass "intentions" and stipends) all masses are offered for all the living and all the dead.
This is possible because of what the Mass is, namely, the sacrifice of Christ's Body and Blood entrusted to and made by the Church at the hands of the priest. That one unique sacrifice is what reconciles the world - all the living and all the dead - to communion with its Creator.
The Church teaches that we complete our "unfinished business" in Purgatory. In Purgatory we are not in punishment but in purification. Purgatory is a deeply happy place. It is there that Christ's redeeming sacrifice is the sunrise that promises the endless day of heaven. The folks in Purgatory are the first to hear the Lord's words This is my Body.
November ends with Advent and the beginning of a new Church year. Next week I hope to write about the season of Advent and why we should be starting the Church's annual cycle, not with Jesus' birth, but with the Last Day, the Day of Judgement.
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