Solemnity of All Souls
November 1, 2013     

 
     I own a little piece of real estate — a very little piece of real estate – on a sloping hillside in Northeast Seattle.  I guess you’d call it undeveloped real estate.  It’s nicely planted with grass but there’s no building on it and never will be.  What kind of building could you put on a 24 square foot lot?!  There’s no building, but one day, a day known only to God, a gravestone with my name and dates inscribed on it will mark the place where I am laid to rest among scores of my brother priests who have served the Church here.

     Once in a while I pay a visit to that little piece of real estate -- not often (I’m Irish but not ghoulish!).  It’s always a sobering but salutary thing for me.  So is my visit to the place only a stone’s throw away where my mother and dad, my grandparents and some aunts and uncles are laid to rest.  I find a certain amount of comfort in that place, to be honest, and a certain amount of challenge.  In a world where we very pointedly hold death at bay – ignore it, sanitize it, euphemize it – my visits to Calvary Cemetery help put death in its proper perspective, and that’s a good thing.  The 16th century French aristocrat, La Rochefoucauld, once wrote that “death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.”  Perhaps, but not to look at death at all is surely not the answer!

     With good reason, then, each year the Church gives us All Souls Day to encourage us to look at death and reflect on it --to get better in touch with the mystery of our mortality as well as the mystery of our immortality and the immortality of countless ranks of sisters and brothers who have gone before us -- some, maybe as recently as last week; others, maybe last year or many long years ago.

     But getting ‘in touch’ with these things is not enough.  Touching is too tentative a thing.  The Church invites us to come closer than that, to come face-to-face with mortality – even to make friends with it, strange as that may seem.  The Church invites us to do as St. Francis of Assisi did, to come to the point where we think of death as “Sister Death” --  where we look upon the hour of its arrival, known only to God, as a gift which God will give in his own good time, a most surprising and paradoxical gift because, while it looks like the end, it is really only the beginning – the very path to life in its fullness.  It was for Jesus and it will be for us.

     There was a time when priests wore black vestments on All Souls Day.  Today it’s the more commonly the white of resurrection, and that’s a good thing. The black pointed to only half of the story and seemed to veil the rest. It seemed to leave unresolved the question of mortality or, worse, it may even have seemed to have resolved it in favor of a standoff, or even a defeat.

     But it is not defeat that we look at this day or any day.  It is victory.  The victory of Jesus: the triumph of light over darkness, of hope over fear, of life over death. This Mass we are celebrating – and every Mass we celebrate -- brings us into the closest possible contact with this central mystery of the Christian faith:  the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the mystery of life that always has the last word no matter how convincing or seemingly final the word spoken by death.

     And so, my friends, we pray today for those who have gone before us, for those whose love has shaped and formed us -- family and friends who have been separated from us by death but with whom we are still very much united in the Communion of Saints.  And we pray also for ourselves, still on the great journey.  We pray with confidence – quiet confidence -- the kind of confidence voiced by the beleaguered and all-but-defeated Job who stubbornly clung to the belief that his Redeemer lived, and that he himself would one day see God in his own flesh, with his own eyes.  We pray with the kind of confidence voiced by St. Paul when he dared to look death in the face with defiance and ask:  "O death, where is your victory?  O death, where is your sting?"

     And the magnificent music of Mozart, itself a sublime and most powerful prayer, is a riveting meditation on the great and ultimate mysteries of the Christian faith: grace and mercy, death and life.  Eternal life.

     I know that all of us here tonight do not profess the same faith or look at life and death in the same way, but we have this much in common: we all struggle to make sense of life and death, and we search for grace, mercy, and peace as we do.  Tonight I find comfort in knowing that -- knowing, too, that our prayer here is more than just our prayer. Our prayer here tonight is part of a great symphony of prayer and praise that has resounded on this Seattle hilltop for well over one-hundred years now – moving hearts, changing lives, piercing the heavens. And it’s a symphony of prayer and praise that echoes eternally around the throne of the living God.

     Father Michael G. Ryan