All Souls

See Commentary on Mark 15:33-39, 16:1-6 in Mark 15:16-41 & Mark 16:1-8

Homily 1 - 2014

“All Saints” gets us thinking of Heaven; “All Souls” of Purgatory. Yet I think that the images we often use of both do justice to neither. 

I personally prefer to make sense of Purgatory and Heaven as stages of the journey of life, that began with conception and end in the embrace of God. Through joys and sufferings, mistakes and successes, I can choose to become more and more human; I can choose to love. That growth is rarely a smooth ride. More likely it involves a succession of break-through moments, liberating insights, painfully learnt, moments of that Jesus called conversion. It can at times seem like dying, letting go of the need to control. This can be frightening, and yet, also surprisingly, satisfying, and even wonderful.

What might life in Purgatory be like? Who knows! My sense is that with death the process of growth begun in this life will intensify. The frightening letting-go, the dying to self involved in all true love, will intensify; but with it will come too the experience of coming alive, of lightness, of joy – until the journey is done, and there is only life and joy. And that is Heaven.

I find helpful that list of commitments that we make at the end of the Apostles Creed.

I believe in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the loving that in God unites Father and Son. It is the energy of ecstasy. It is their mutual delighting in each other. It is their dance of love. So life now, and Purgatory later, will involve my deliberately handing myself over to the divine energy of ecstasy. I believe in, I say Yes to, that process of love.

I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. When St Paul referred to Church, he was not thinking of the institution. He was writing of us as the Body of Christ. As a member of that Church, the Body of Christ, by being in Christ, I am drawn into the living dance of the Trinity. That being one of the Body of Christ, that christening, involves a process of continuing and increasing transformation – already in this life, beginning with Baptism, and continuing beyond this life into Purgatory.

I believe in the Communion of Saints. This is wonderful! The Communion of Saints is all of us, being transformed into Christ. The Trinity do not simply love each other. Their love is explosive. They created the cosmos and all of us in their exuberance of love. And they draw us into their love for everyone and everything, helping and empowering us to love real people, without exception. Those we already love or have loved, we never love to our full satisfaction. But we shall. Everyone will be drawn into, drawing each other into, a festival of ever-strengthening love. No one abandoned in Purgatory!

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. I say Yes to that, too – whole-heartedly. Given our radical brokenness, forgiveness is the necessary condition for any Communion of Saints. Purgatory, then, will be a festival of universal reconciliation, of forgiving and being forgiven – totally, utterly.

I believe in the resurrection of the body. Every experience of my life is stored in my memory, some in my conscious memory, most in my unconscious. Those memories in turn are stored within the cells of my brain. My body [including my brain], my humanity, will be transformed, transformed by God’s love. My inner wounds will be healed – those wounds that hold my resentments, my hostilities, my fears, my obsessions and my refusals. And I will be set free – free at last to love without restriction.

Finally [no surprise!], I believe in life everlasting. I say my total Yes to life, to life that is love, fully conscious, fully free, fully me, drawn into the vortex of divine love, into a discovery so intense that time loses meaning and everything is the eternal now of immediate undistracted experience. That will be Heaven!