Summary: Every time we gather around this altar I say on your behalf: “Remember also our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection, and all who have died in your mercy: welcome them into the light of your face.”In some ways this makes every Mass a Mass for the dead, a time for remembering or restoring what has been separated. For those of us who believe and express ourselves in this Catholic tradition, death does not separate us from one another. As the Invitation to Prayer so beautifully says in the Rite of Christian Burial: “We believe that the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel with death.” Each time we gather before this altar we do so in the communion of saints. Prayers for the dead in our tradition began at the very beginning in the earliest Christian communities who cared so lovingly for the bodies of those martyrs whose blood bore witness to their common hope in the resurrection. Those early Christians did so because the recognized the unbreakable bond that joins us all together in Christ, the living and the dead like. “Nothing can separate us from Christ” says Saint Paul. Not even death.Thirteen hundred years ago a famous English Benedictine priest gave us some beautiful thoughts about this. He wrote: We seem to give them back to you, O God, who gave them first to us. Yet as you did not lose them in giving, so we do not lose them by their return. Not as the world gives do you give. What you give you do not take away. For what is yours is also ours. We are yours and life is eternal. And love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is but the limit of our sight. (The Venerable Bede, 673-735) The Venerable Bede gives us much to think about tonight, and his words propose a faithful and profoundly comforting way of living and celebrating All Souls Day.We are resurrection people, Easter people who live in and through our oneness with Christ living now in us when we are one as church. This is a day of Thanksgiving, of day for gratitude for what God has given us in those we remember. As Bede says, God gave them first, and God lost nothing in giving them to us. We lose nothing in giving them back to God because God’s gifts are never taken away since what is God’s is also ours for God has given us everything God has: God’s Life, God’s only Son, God’s very Spirit.It is this faith that tempers our sadness and our loss. It is this faith that calls us here every Easter to light a fire in the darkness, to bring a new candle into this dark church, to take light from this candle that never dims no matter how much light is taken from it. See the symbol. Understand the mystery. The life of God poured out for us is never lost and never less. One day death will claim us all. There is no escape, but for those of us who gather at the foot of the cross week after week, there is the constant reminder that death has been defeated, and Life claims the victory. The one who called Lazarus from the tomb has himself burst the bonds of death and scattered the darkness. Why not believe that he will call us from our tombs as well to be remembered among those already gone before us. Perhaps if we, like Martha and Mary at the time Lazarus died call upon him and profess our faith as did Mary we shall find courage, comfort, and joy in this autumn season when all nature seems to take its rest for one reason only, to rise, to bloom, to bear fruit in the morning.
