All Souls Day (11/2/03)
I LIKE SOULS . . . I relate more to All Souls than All Saints, probably because like most believers I would settle for being one of the former and find ambitioning the latter a bit presumptive if not foolish. On the other hand, Leon Bloy (1846–1917, French) said there is only one tragedy, not to be a saint, or so I heard in a marianum at Milford in the early '50s, from the late John Hoffman. Note, French, and thus prone to the grand and the absolute: can you imagine Chesterton saying that?
The marianum was a sermon during dinner time, given from the refectory pulpit without public address system (there was none) to 200-plus avidly eating listeners over clash of knives, forks, glasses, and four-wheeled carts. You would start your marianum, named after Mary and expected to make at least passing allusion to her as inspiration of someone's life, even if he suffered the tragedy of not being a saint, as carts, or trucks, as we called them, rolled out like bees out of a hive.
There you were, as young as 18 or 19, a 2nd-year novice, speaking sans notes, sans mike, sans everything but your memory and the months of nerve-wracked preparation, which included writing, getting approved, memorizing, and repeatedly delivering your sermon. You were lucky not to throw up. Everyone I heard in four Milford years, 1950-54 -- two as a novice, two as a classics-scholar "junior" -- was at least that lucky.
EVEN PATHS OF GLORY LEAD THERE . . . To the All Souls Day readings, then. They are a hymn to everlasting life thanks to God and Jesus. Nothing less. The preacher should seize this day to meditate about dying in the Lord. Reams have been written in the spiritual books for eons about this: We have here not a lasting habitation. We live on borrowed time. We were born to die. Death is a release. We are born for eternal life; this shadow existence is a probationary time. Very medieval.
But ye gods and little fishes, do we not have to remind ourselves of that early and often? It may be a wonderful life, and not just for Jimmy Stewart and friends at Christmas time. It may be a very hard life, full of disappointment. It may be a terrible life. But we are lilies of the field, here today, gone tomorrow. We have great obligations to each other to plan and scrimp and save. That's a given. But it all will pass.
"The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces," says Isaiah today, chap. 25. We were baptized "into Christ Jesus . . . buried with him . . . so that we might live in newness of life," the inimitable Paul tells Romans, chap. 6. New life here and now, yes, but today is the day to think about the dead and dying. "This is the will of my father," says Jesus in John 6, "that everyone who sees the Son and Believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise them up on the last day."
We 2003 U.S. RC's are so concerned about being oblivious of the needs of our neighbors in the day-to-day that we neglect our need to work at seeing death as a transit. It's neither lugubrious nor insensitive to labor this point, just sensible.
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Jim Bowman
www.blithe-spirit.com
Oak Park IL, USA
