All Souls’ Day

“Now is not the time for this.” I can think of few phrases that so capture the spirit of our age and its perspective as this. We are obsessed with schedule and itinerary and the control we believe they give us. Life must be arranged and it must be optimized. But as we all know, reality does not yield in this way, and few things reveal the objectivity and intractability of reality as death. We do everything we can to defer and distract from our reckoning with death; it’s never quite the right time to consider it, after all. And so we must see it as a severe mercy that we are halted this day and called to remember again.

All Saints and All Souls begin a brief season we call Hallowtide. Hallowtide is an octave, or eight-day cycle of prayer, near the end of the Trinity Season. It is no accident that significant feasts of the Christian year often come with octaves to observe them. An octave is a seven-day cycle plus one. Sequences of seven always call us back to Creation, to the making of a new thing. The number eight, though, adds to that creation cycle the significance of salvation, hearkening back to Noah and the Ark on which eight were saved from the flood. An octave is how we understand Creation in light of the Resurrection, and is why we regard Sunday, the Lord’s Day, as both the first and eighth day of the week. Octaves often fall into non-observance, though, and I think it is because they can never neatly line up with the secular workweek. This is perhaps their best quality and one that is essential for us in our spiritual growth. Christian time and its octaves refuse to submit to a sense of beginning or ending within the world’s time—Christian feasts break the rules of the world’s story. To observe them begins to draw us into a greater way of marking time and its meaning.

Secular time, by definition, is always concerned with what can be accomplished in a single lifetime. Because of this, the world’s time will always only know the time between birth and death. Hallowtide calls us back to Christian time and its attending story, which begins in Baptism and ends in the Resurrection. The image of the Saints that we received yesterday is an image of Christ exalting, in the Resurrection, the humanity He assumed in His Incarnation. The image of the Saints is an image of our eventual partaking in that Resurrection. As Christians we confess that death does not have the final word, but has been swallowed up by victory. This vantage point given to us in Christ is the only thing that makes any meditation on death possible, because it alone allows us to look at the mystery of death from the other side. Like an octave compared with the secular week, we have an eighth day to consider—where the world’s story ends, our story goes on.

But before we can enter that glorious eighth day, we have to contend with death. We have to remember that the exaltation of Christ knows both His Resurrection and His Passion. If the Son of Man was made to submit to the humiliation of death, we cannot expect a different outcome as His followers. A full sense of the Christian life acknowledges, when it comes to the humiliation and glory of Jesus, that we share in both of these or neither of them. All Saints goes hand in hand with All Souls. We cannot understand what we are as Christians without understanding that we all participate in the death of our Lord and the suffering that attends it. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not a person of the Cross. Christians can never be death deniers without creating for themselves a delusional perspective of who they are or the Lord they worship. Yet there are many things we do not know about death and what comes after the departure of our loved ones.

This is why we are here today. All Souls commemorates every deathbed and funeral we have ever attended. All Souls’ Day, as in the Liturgy for a Requiem, is a scripting of our experience of death while preserving the fullness of humanity, both our own and that of the departed. Regarded from within secular time, all we can do at the end of a life is to note the end and look to the living. But we all know that this is insufficient. Even people without faith memorialize and try to find a way to narrate the experience of still being connected to those who have gone on. Humans are not objects, after all. Humans are relational. As soon as a human begins to exist, they exist in relationships, and always will. Those relations can be intimate or estranged, distant or close, but those relations cannot cease to be. In death, it is no different. When humans die, we cannot just ‘let them go’ or ‘move on from them.’

Instead, in the funeral mass, we ‘commend’ our departed to God. We cannot release them into the ether. To make it through an experience of death with a whole heart means entrusting them, handing them into the hand of God, who receives them in the same breath they are offered. Our relationship with them remains, even if it is to be reoriented and reconfigured by God’s new work in them. All Souls’ Day gathers into one prayer all of the ones we have laid to rest. It is a way the liturgical year shepherds to commend again and pray for our departed loved ones—today calls us to remember that they are still real, still connected to us, and still on their journey into God.

All Souls is, finally, a call to remember our death. We gather in love to pray for our departed, knowing that we will someday be the ones who are named and commended to God again. This day returns us to the fact that we are in the trials of dying even now and that these tribulations will increase until we, at last, face the trial of death itself, our last great adversary. It seems strange that we should go from All Saints to All Souls, from glory and peace back to the pain and sacrifice of redemption. But nothing else can make endurable our confrontation of death but the fact that there is a good God into whose hands we commit our dead and will be committed ourselves. Today’s observance calls us in the midst of these trials to a confident assurance that the work He has already begun in them, of which we have seen only a brief season, is a work that He will go on to complete. He is a God who keeps his promises.

So let the octave of Hallowtide conquer your other time of this week; whenever we allow time to end for us here in this place, right then we receive a glimpse of God’s good end and so begin to know the time of the Kingdom. Then we see that those who were before us are those who await ahead of us. Then we see those who are home, and then those who are heading home, and then ourselves—we are one pilgrim people, at different places on the way, but it is one unbroken way. Now is the time for this. As Jesus said: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live.”