Daily Reflection The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)

Untitled Poem

I basked in you; 

I loved you helplessly, with a 

 boundless, tongue-tied love.

And death doesn't prevent me

 from loving you.

Besides, 

 in my opinion you aren't dead.

(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

                     ~Franz Wright

Visiting the gravesite of grandparents and other members of my Midwestern family tree was an important tradition of my growing up. Memorial Day, Father's and Mother's Day, Veteran's Day, birthdays and anniversaries of deaths -- each found our family pruning bushes, planting annuals, putting up or taking down the permissible holiday grave blankets or decorations. My parents were unexpectedly quite loquacious there. It was the best place for learning the stories of the joys, struggles, hopes, and dreams of my heritage, and later for me, where I learned to claim the strong and sure promises of our Christian faith for people I had never met.

The commemoration we celebrate today is an invitation from the Church to that same impulse and sensibility -- to pause, to pray, to ponder, and to hold close both those still alive to us in love and the strong assurances of our faith, even when the physical details of the resurrection of the body as a tenet of our faith can still seem so surrounded in Mystery. We who are still alive in our earthly bodies join with our brothers and sisters, those righteous souls who now exist in the presence of God, awaiting the fullness of God's kingdom when body and soul are reunited eternally, a place where death has no sting, where grave has no victory. On this day we give another 'funeral liturgy eulogy' to those bedrock foundations of our trust and hope.

This is a day for us the living, too -- a day to pray for those who had no one to pray for them in this life, or a day to commit to what Fr. Ron Rolheiser calls a central task of the adult faith journey, to 'bless our roots.' It is a day where we might pray for healing, for ourselves this time, leaving at the graveside any part of our history with the deceased that continues to haunt us with hurt feelings, bitterness, or betrayal. We see those persons now restored to the image that God has always had of them, a day when we can say with heartfelt sincerity, like our Jewish brothers and sisters, "Of blessed memory."

The Holy City of Rome is filled with works by the Baroque architect and sculptor Bernini, who lived and died in the 17th century. Considered a worthy successor of Michelangelo, he sculpted Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, created the breathtaking baldacchino over the altar in St. Peter's Basilica, and designed the oval piazza and the surrounding colonnades outside its doors. Yet, at his own request, he is buried in the floor of a side altar at Santa Maria Maggiore, marked with a simple tombstone plaque made with his very hands. "Here lies Gian Lorenzo Bernini, awaiting the resurrection."

On this All Souls Day, we celebrate that the souls of the just are at peace, in the hands of God. And we await in joyful hope that day when we will be redeemed, perfected, glorified, whole.... resurrected.