HW All Souls: Remembering our beloved dead in love, in hope and in faith.

A reflection for the feast of All Souls. Written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
2 November 2025
All Souls

Welcome
In the month of November and especially this weekend, we are remembering all those who have gone before us. In the northern hemisphere, there is something natural about remembering the dead as the daylight grows noticeably shorter.

Topic
As we name our own beloved dead, whatever we say about them has a triple resonance. When we speak of the next life, we speak of our dead, we speak of ourselves and we speak of our God. We do this in love, hope and faith.

Steps
First of all, in love. As we know from personal experience, those who have gone from us have not ceased to be part of our lives. On the contrary, they can be even more intensely part of who we are, more intensely present to us. There is more to this than the psychology of loss. As people of faith, we entrust our beloved dead to the living God, from whom we all came, because to him all are alive. I like very much a sentiment of Edward Schillebeecks OP, in a prayer for the dead:

Father, we cannot believe all they have meant to us is lost forever.
You are their life, now and always.

Secondly in hope. What we say of the dead, we also say of ourselves. In the Eucharist we pray regularly the words: we hope to share with them your everlasting glory. It is, of course, a challenge to imagine how our beloved dead are — even “where” they are. The very same challenge comes up in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15. Some in Corinth, precisely because of a failure of imagination, did not believe the dead would rise in Christ. St Paul tries to open up their imaginations a bit, even though he knows that he does not really know what he is talking about!!! Does it matter that we cannot imagine it? No/yes. No, of course not. It is enough to believe “to him all are alive”. But on the others hand, we are only human and it would help if we somehow could somehow picture it all. The key is given in John’s Gospel in a startling sentence: eternal life is this to believe in the one whom you have sent. It is startling because of the present tense: “is”. In other words, the relationship we now have with Christ will not be destroyed by our physical death. It will see us across the bar of death itself.

Finally, in faith. It is perhaps not often realised that faith in the resurrection of the dead was, in Jesus’ day, a relatively new doctrine. That was why it was rejected by the Temple traditionalists, the Sadducees. It can surprise that ancient Israelites believed in God without believing in life after death. We tend to make a fairly close link between belief in God and belief in the next life. The ancient Israelites did not. For centuries, they believed in God and God’s grace for this life only. They were very unlike the neighbouring peoples in this regard. The Egyptians, for example, had a very elaborate idea of the next life and all the accoutrements you would need there. Nevertheless, by the time of Jesus, many Jews believed in the resurrection, especially the Pharisees such as Paul before his encounter with the risen Christ.

The evolution of doctrine was, in part, triggered by persecution. In the books of the Maccabees, a Syrian ruler initiated a time of persecution and martyrdom. What about those who died for their faith in God? To be able to speak consistently of God’s faithfulness and justice, they widened their perspective to include life after death and resurrection. There was no one way of looking at this but they were convinced that God would be faithful and just and, ultimately, loving. We are the heirs to that doctrinal evolution.

Conclusion
We have in our hearts the names of all who have gone from us in the past year. Others from previous years, we also hold in our hearts.  We remember in love our beloved dead. We recall in hope that their destiny is ours. And we believe in God, who is faithful and loving, the God for whom all are alive.

Let me conclude by repeating the prayer of Edward Schillebeeckx:

Father, we cannot believe all they have meant to us is lost forever.
You are their life, now and always.