2/11/25
All Souls Day
By a lovely coincidence, All Souls Day falls on a Sunday this year. Our day of resurrection. The first day of the week, when the women went to the tomb whilst it was still dark. They came expecting to find a sealed grave. But instead they found an empty tomb, a couple of angels and a ‘gardener’ in mufti. They came with spices expecting to anoint a corpse. They were given a different task. To spread some excellent news and all of this would have required a lot of trust and oodles of prayer. Trust is what we always do whenever we pray.
For the recipe of prayer always has a hefty wodge of trust. You can’t have one without the other. Like yeast in the bread or sugar in the chocolate. It is in our trusting, in our reluctant handing over of our departed, that we allow the possibility of peace and love to surround us. This is a harrowing task as we relinquish those who are most dear to us. And there is a big part of us that does not want to let them go. We’re really not quite sure that we can hand them over. We don’t know if we are ready, and perhaps, if we are ruthlessly honest, we never want to release them.
But what if, in fact, we don’t send them away from us, but rather entrust them to that other dimension, maybe the 7th dimension, where in fact they are actually closer to us in a special way that is both mysterious, poignant, and lovely. For in handing them over, we also commend ourselves.
You see, when someone we love so deeply and dearly goes over to the other side, a large chunk of ourselves goes over with them. To entrust our loved ones to an invisible God is to entrust a substantial part of ourselves. But we want to be in control of all of ourselves 100% and All Souls Day says that the number is wrong.
Can we really put aside our need to control? To allow what God wants, to replace what we want, what I want, what I need.
This is tough because often this purportedly loving God will, in return for our faith and our loved ones, give us questions instead of answers. He will take our laughter and give us tears. In return for our delectable memories, he will exchange a cup of futility and ache. But if we can surrender ourselves completely or begin to, or at least say that we want to, we come to understand that he does not take away the serrated knifing throb, but rather that His own piercing is actually our piercing. His tears for Lazarus… are our tears for our loved ones.
So slowly we begin to glimpse the reality that in our mourning, we are not separated from him at all, but he is right here with us. Not distinct from our torture, but immersed with us at the altar in our broken bread and hearts. No earthly thing can separate us at all. It just looks like it, and boy, it sure feels like it.
It is a long and very rocky road with boulders, futility and dust. Perhaps it will take a lifetime with lots of tricks and trips. We all know of times when we thought that we were travelling pretty well, thank you very much. We’re going OK. I can do this. And then from nowhere … a piece of music, an aroma, a photo, the compassionate unexpected word and all of a sudden we find that we are sprawled lying in the dust, weeping helplessly…. again… We didn’t see it coming, but here we are, tripped up, surprised by grief and surprised by the potent poignant privilege of having loved so very deeply for such a long time.
There is a sense in which the helpless and demolished loaf at the altar is the only thing that begins to make sense of that emotion and dark place which has always defied comprehension, words and logic.
This is my body broken for you. This is my blood poured out for you. These are my tears that I have shed for you. And when we have said that and begun to understand all that, when we have to come to that place where we have used up all our words and we are left with none. When we are gutted and empty. When we admit that we have no understanding but only raw emotion, when the last sob has escaped us, and we resignedly lower our furious fist of ‘why’.When we have lived eucharist, then, and only then, can peace and love begin to seep in and start to envelope us.
So in the last, reunited with our brothers and sisters, when we lie in the dust of our own grave, we will discover that peace and love surrounded us, and our burning desire to rest peacefully and eternally in you will finally be accomplished.
Lord, may no earthly thing
ever separate us from you,
But may everyone and everything support us
with a burning desire to rest peacefully and eternally in you.
Amen.