Popular piety reserved the month of November to the faithful departed. In these 30 days we visit our cemeteries so as to pray for our dear departed ones and show them our affection once again. In doing so we want to feel them close to us. How true then is the saying: “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.”
Death is an awkward subject to discuss. Despite the ongoing endeavour to discard the thought of it, death features everywhere simply because it concerns every man and woman, in every time and place around the globe. Steve Jobs rightly put it: “Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
Fortunately, the Christian perspective on death and life is not at all dramatic but completely soteriological. Although the Christian fears death yet s/he knows that after this earthly life there is an eternity that lies in store for him/her, provided that s/he believes in the Risen Lord. Did not Jesus tell us: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn 11, 25-26)? Did not Jesus affirm in Luke’s gospel that “He is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him” (Luke 20, 38)? Does not this demonstrate that God continues to be faithful to his covenant with humanity, which covenant death itself can never annihilate?
In his weekly catechesis of November 2, Pope Benedict XVI noted that “the Solemnity of All Saints and the Commemoration of the faithful departed tell us that only he who is able to recognise a great hope in death is able also to live a life that springs from hope. ... Man needs eternity — and every other hope, for him, is all too brief, is all too limited. Man is explainable only if there is a Love that overcomes all isolation — even that of death — in a totality that transcends even space and time. Man is explainable — he finds his deepest meaning — only if God is”.
If God is love and eternal, then love is eternal too. Thus, eternal life expands our capacity to love not only the living but also the faithful departed, principally the souls in Purgatory. According to Saint Catherine of Genoa, the latter’s “greatest suffering ... is their awareness that something in them displeases God, that they have deliberately gone against his great goodness. In a state of grace, these souls fully grasp the meaning of what blocks them on their way to God.”
We can greatly help these souls to be released from Purgatory. Masses for the dead, giving alms to the poor, fasting and mortifying one’s body with the intention of aiding them can only hasten their purification.
“O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor 15, 55).
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann