Practice Homily- All Souls

Journeys have beginnings and ends.  Our lives are inexorably tied together with these familiar realities.  We experience them in our daily lives and yet at the deepest core of our beings we experience a longing for something more, a sense that death itself cannot be the end; the overwhelming desire to live and experience a life without pain or suffering, one full of joy, happiness, and peace in which, at long last, like a weary wanderer, at last arriving at the destination, we will fully be satisfied.  For Christians, the typical end of our life’s journey has become a re-birth to new and eternal life.

Today, the feast of All Souls, is a special day in the life of the Church.  Following on the heels of the celebration of All Saints, that is, the blessed in heaven which we call the Church Triumphant, today we remember all those who have died, and in a particular way, pray for all those who are journeying through purgatory on their way to their ultimate destination of heaven.  We call these countless souls the Church Suffering, for having departed their earthly lives they have been awarded the gift of eternal life and are in the process of being prepared, refined, and purified to encounter the glory of God face to face.

Since ancient times, following the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been a revealed truth that we should pray for the souls of our beloved dead, and indeed for all those who have gone before us.  Our prayers for their souls seek to shorten their time there and to speed them along to the path to heaven.  Eternally grateful for our prayers in helping them reach the blessedness of heaven, they become our heavenly advocates and pray for us to join them in paradise.  What a beautiful cycle of grace!

How should we understand purgatory, this intermediate step between earth and heaven?

Over the centuries, many different saints have provided us with mystical glimpses of purgatory.  The ultimate theme underlying them is that the souls in purgatory experience in an incredibly vivid way the reality of “Already but not yet” of the intense longing for union with our Creator, and the gradual shifting of focus of the self of “I” into the “Thou” of God. In other words, “I must decrease so that He may increase.” 

Purgatory is not something to be feared or seen as some sort of spiteful punishment.

It is far from it!  We should hope to enter heaven directly by always seeking holiness and striving to live a faithful sacramental life.  However, we know all to well our own failings and missteps in following Christ.  Ultimate perfection will only be found in the Lord, so often he permits souls to first enter purgatory before they can arrive in heaven.  This is a supreme act of God’s love for He wishes to draw all to Himself and will do whatever it takes, short of interfering with our free will, to get us to heaven.  But we must be open to His love and grace.  This is our daily task.

An image that I often use is to think of purgatory as that stage between the birth of a newborn and the moment when the infant is placed in his or her mother’s waiting arms.  What occurs during that time?  The umbilical cord is cut, severing the child’s physical ties with his or her previous existence, the infant is cleansed (washed of impurities) measured and weighed, vital signs are checked, etc.,  and then the infant is ready to enter the loving embrace of his or her parents.  A new life’s journey has begun!

Finally freed from any of our remaining attachments, via God’s love in purgatory, we can look forward to encountering at last the Holy Trinity in the beauty of heaven.  In the words of the ancient Christian chant, used in funerals for millennia, (In Paradisum) “May the angels lead you to paradise…”