All Souls Day Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons 2 November 2017

All Souls, Poland

Since we are celebrating 500 years since the start of the Reformation this All Souls Day is particularly poignant, not because it has any milestone, but because one of the biggest losses in terms of the reformed church was that Catholic and Orthodox ability to commemorate and pray for the dead. Yes, indulgences, Tetzel and the excesses of bad piety such as the varied interpretations of purgatory as a place to which the dead had to get out of, and who by prayers and amasses got remittance in terms of days months or years, had created a superstitious aspect to piety and practice which was regrettable, but in casting out prayers for the dead something was lost!

The New York Times published an elegiac and haunting article by Dan Barry on October 28th, 2017 called: THE LOST CHILDREN OF TUAM. It details the stories of people who lived in that Institution but particularly of those babies buried in the grounds of St Mary's Mother and Baby home, where stacks of little bodies were found buried in the cleared out septic pits and tunnels, still there in the grounds, the remains of infants who died of endemic disease. There was nothing sinister about their deaths except the lack of care and the dreadful numbers involved, a terrible tale of horrible attitudes in Church and Community about unmarred mothers and of their children. Yet as Dan Barry put it, the dead speak for 'the departed stay present', hidden or forgotten for so long, these little ones are now being named and owned.

I have mused over this difficulty of some Christian traditions in dealing with the task of remembering and praying for the dead. Is it right to do so? Don't we just hand them over to God? Who alone knows the secrets of our hearts? Maybe, but at a deep visceral level death tears from us love, a living relationship, which we then have to turn round, often with great difficulty into a new relationship. Who amongst us can say of a dead loved one that they no longer matter, that we don't think of them? I think of my dead mother and father every day, the loss of my Grandfather when I was five and a half still is with me now nearly sixty years later, and the love I had for him has never diminished, so it is with all my dead and I suspect yours too, they are there rooted in us, in a love bitter sweet and alive, not gone! They are missed and we long to see, touch be with them.

Humans, along with some other animals like the elephants and the great apes mourn their dead, go back time and time again to their graves or places associated with them, handle their remains with reverence and care. It is not just our mortal remains; it is also us in tangible form.

So for me at any rate, praying is important, we can formulate our prayers, ask pardon for those who have died, hope they are with God, but what we say does not matter so much as the sorrow and love bound up in that deeper wordless prayer, which God alone understands. God's time is not our time. For example it has been a hundred years since the Somme or battles of the First World War, but their dead speak still. This year my brother and I visited Delvlle Wood where the Grandfather I knew was wounded in 1916, and I must admit that I wept there, not for him but for the thousands of young laid out in their graves in the late August sun as well as those who have no known grave. They spoke, the silence spoke volumes, people visiting were respectful quite transfixed by the wood itself and the thousands of graves laid out, many bearing the words, 'unknown soldier', it was a holy place where time and eternity, life and death are caught together.

So All Souls Day is not a day of gloom or sorrow but a day of anticipation, we are not yet there, the grave has not claimed us nor the risen Christ fully met us, yet we know deep within that his voice, his presence is real and makes all the dead real, for through him they are alive. St Bede describes Christ as our Morning Star, the one that never sets, that door to eternal life. Those who have gone before us are with us still, our companions, the company of heaven, and the people of the living God.

May they rest in peace and rise in glory!