All Souls: All the Faithful Departed

Wisdom 3:1-9

When I was ten years old, we gave my grandmother a calendar with family pictures. I think that’s a fairly standard Christmas gift for a grandmother. She hung it up in her closet . . . and it continued to hang there for the next twenty-seven years. On it, year by year, she noted major life events: vacations, births, marriages, deaths. Long after it ceased being useful as a way of noting the day of the week, the calendar provided a different way of marking time, through the vital rhythms of human lives and relationships. It was an icon of sorts, making present all those people who surrounded her.

On this day of All Souls, we are called especially to remember and make present all those who have surrounded us and who now rest in death. We celebrated at the feast of All Saints yesterday those champions of faith whose closeness to God makes them radiate God’s love, as surely as their icons in glass in the Chapel windows shine with the morning sunlight. Today we commemorate those whose light may be known only to us and to God. We will shortly hear many of their names; many, many—uncountably more—rest in our hearts. We will hear their names, with our ears or in our hearts, and make them present.

And why? Because we believe that in our journey to God, death is not the end. We believe that death is not the destruction of the soul, but the passing of the soul into the hands of God: “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them,” we hear in the first-century Wisdom of Solomon (Wis 3:1). We believe that those whose light may be known in this life to us alone are nevertheless fully known, and held, and loved by God.

And because we believe that life follows death. As we have passed from death to life in our baptism, so too do we believe that we will be called from death to life at the end of all things. Jesus and Saint Paul both write of the rising of those who hear the Lord’s voice (Jn 5:25, 1 Thes 4:16); the book of Wisdom speaks of the “time of their visitation” when these innumerable pinpricks of light “will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble” (Wis 3:7).

We believe these things to be true, and so we hold up today in prayer all those who have gone before us into God’s embrace, all those who hold us in prayer with God. They are with us still, part of our own vital rhythms, helping us to mark time in our earthly pilgrimage. We see their light, and it runs through us now, “like sparks through the stubble,” and we shine.

Amen.