Remembering the Faithful Departed!

Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)

Wis 3:1-9; Rom 6:3-9; Jn 6:37-40

As we celebrate All Souls’ Day, we commemorate the deaths of our family members and friends. 

Without exception, almost all cultures remember and honor their dead members. 

While for non-Christians remembering the dead could be a cultural practice, for Christians it is an important religious observance. 

In this sense, though for atheists and nonbelievers, this is a meaningless or superstitious ritual with no future scope, we Christians observe the day in the strong faith that our dead family members and friends will rise to eternal life just as the Lord himself rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.  

Hence, our remembrance of the dead is strongly faith-based. But there are also a couple of other reasons that demand that we remember and honor the dead. 

1.Human Finiteness: Our finiteness offers a strong reason why we must remember the dead. In other words, our solidarity with the dead comes from our finite reality. In this sense, remembering the dead is to remind ourselves that, as humans, we can never escape the reality of death, and our life on earth lasts but a short time. Hence, the passing of our family members and friends is the yardstick for us to examine the quality of our lives and course-correct them if needed. While some deaths become a lesson, the deaths of some others become an inspiration to live our lives fruitfully so that it benefits others and society. But we must remember that it is not to grow in despair that we remember the dead, but that the shortness of life and the uncertainty that surrounds it should encourage us to live our present lives worthily and well. In other words, our very finality offers the reason to celebrate this one life and find meaning and relevance through it. 

2. Human Sociality: The common fact of our social life requires that we remember and honor the dead. The social beings we are, our lives can never be lived in isolation. Hence, when someone in our community departs from this world, we are compelled to remember the person because of the sociality that we shared with him or her. Here, we must remember that forgetting the dead is equivalent to causing their second death. We remember those with whom we shared our lives to show that death was not their final erasure from the earth, but we make them relive through our memories. In this way, they continue to shape our lives and help us make our existence meaningful. We continue to share the memories of those with whom we shared our very lives. 

3. Christian Faith:  Our faith teaches that we remember the dead so, as Our Lord rose from the dead, they too will one day rise to eternal life. By remembering the dead and praying for their souls, we firmly believe that we may recreate the communitarian existence with all of them in our heavenly destination. Besides this, there is a more profound reason why our faith commands that we commemorate the faithful departed. In the separation of death from faith, human finality looks so cruel that we may never be able to overcome our despair and frustration. But when we see our death in the light of faith, it gives us hope. We then begin to consider this life as preparation for the next. Then, we learn not to take life for granted and begin to approach every moment of our life with a sense of mindfulness that carries meaning with it. 

Let us pray that our commemoration of the faithful departed may help us with inspiration and purpose to live this life in all depth and profundity. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar