Earlier this week, I conducted a funeral service out at Calvary Cemetery
in Northeast Seattle, and afterwards, I did what I often do: walked over
a little hillside to spend some time in quiet prayer at the place where
my family members lie buried. It’s always a moving experience to stand
on that holy ground marked by a modestly imposing tombstone where my
mother and father lie buried, along with my grandparents, aunts, uncles,
and cousins. I read their names on the headstones, picture the faces of
the ones I knew, hear their voices, remember a few of their stories,
have a little chat with them, and tell God of my gratitude for them: for
who they were and for what they gave me: life, love, faith, a heritage,
a history, and the promise of a future that will bring all of us
together one day, together in God.
The older I get, the more I
find myself noticing the dates on the grave markers as well as the
names. This is a bit sobering. My Mom lived to be 95, but my Dad died at
54, and his dad died at 59. There was a time, of course, when those
numbers seemed old to me, but no longer. Thoughts of my own mortality
begin to take over. And then I recall this striking thought from the
great Cardinal Newman (now St. John Henry Newman): “each year, one
passes, without knowing it, over the day of one’s death, as if walking
over one’s grave.” Now, if that’s not a s striking thought and a
sobering thought, I don’t know what is…!
Those personal reflections
may be more than you needed, but I share them with you to help focus on
just what it is the Church wants us to be thinking about on this day we
call All Souls.
It is
with good reason that, each year, the Church sets aside this day to help
us get better in touch with the mystery of mortality: our own, yes, and
the mortality of those countless ranks of our sisters and brothers,
known and unknown, who have gone before us – some, many long years ago;
others perhaps as recently as last week, last month or last year.
And, yes, the Church also
gives us this day to pray for those who have gone before us – an ancient
practice of the Church that is grounded in the great doctrine of the
Communion of Saints, a doctrine we proclaim every time we recite the
Creed, and a teaching that has its roots in that beautiful passage from
the Letter to the Hebrews about “the great cloud of witnesses” that
surrounds us. It is our firm belief that God’s holy people are those
both living and dead, and that among those who have died are the saints
in glory and those still being shaped and formed for glory. The
Communion of Saints says that there is a real communion, an ongoing
communion between the living and the dead or, as I prefer to put it,
between the living and the more living. It is a communion nurtured by
prayer – ours for them, theirs for us.
None of the great settings of
the Requiem Mass including Mozart’s, make sense apart from these
traditional Christian beliefs. It was those very beliefs that inspired
Mozart’s musical genius and that give his masterpiece transcendent
beauty, authenticity, and a mysterious power to stir and awaken faith as
it takes us from the realities of our present existence and gives us a
taste of eternity. With good reason, Pope Benedict once referred to
Mozart, not as our greatest composer, but as “perhaps our greatest
theologian.” Tonight, I think of Mozart as perhaps our greatest
preacher.
My friends,
in an age often called secular or “post Christian,” Mozart’s Requiem is
nearly always performed in a concert hall. It’s a magnificent work of
art but rather divorced from its original purpose and for some, I’m
sure, a slightly quaint relic: a leftover from another time and place, a
glorious form lacking substance.
But tonight, we dare to say
something different. We dare not only to perform a Requiem but to
celebrate a Requiem. In doing so we are making a statement, an act of
faith. We are allowing Mozart’s magnificent musical composition help us
plumb the depths of the great Christian mysteries of life, death, and
resurrection, to help us transcend the limits of time and space, to put
us in close communion with the Communion of Saints, to take us to that
table in an Upper Room where bread and wine became for all time
sacraments of a Body broken and of Blood poured out in love beyond all
telling.
Make no mistake about it, my
friends: what we do tonight is an expression of faith or, maybe for
some, a reaching out for faith – faith in the God of life, faith in
Jesus who gave his life for us and gained it back in the giving, faith
in the God who one day will give us life in its fullness but who has
already begun to give that life to us even now as we continue along our
pilgrim way!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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