As another year of grace ends, the Church, appropriately enough, recalls what the Lord told us about the end of time.
And I have always been delighted by the practice followed by artists in the late middle ages of painting today’s Gospel on the back wall of almost every Church. So, as the people left Church, they would be reminded of the Last Things.
There, on one side of the door, the dead would rise from their graves, caught up in the air to be judged by Christ, reigning gloriously from a nimbus of light held aloft by angelic hosts.
Above the rising Saints, the angels gather the sheep who have kept his commandment to love others as he has loved them. They are the ones who have washed their robes in his blood and are now called to the Supper of the Lamb!
While on the other side were those who have not loved, those who had chosen the way of neglect and perdition and are now faced with what the Book of Revelation calls the "second death" (cf. Revelation 20:14-15; 21:8).
The wondrously perverse medieval mind depicted their tortures as commensurate with their sins; and while it is salutary to our souls to keep such gross reminders ever-before our wandering eyes, we must admit that no fire nor pincer nor other diabolic torture could ever approach the horror of being apart from the love of God…in utter aloneness, cold darkness and fear. Or, in the awful words of Pope Benedict: “…he who dies in mortal sin, without repentance, locked in prideful rejection of God's love, excludes himself from the Kingdom of life.”
Which is what brings us to the reason Jesus and the Church tell us this story today. It is not just to scare us, though scare us it should, but to inspire us to be good and to pray for those who have died.
Perhaps it is on purpose that the Church ends the month of November the same way she began, with prayers for the dead. For death does not end our relationships.
I often tell the seminarians that if someone gets up and preaches a long eulogy at my Funeral, they should throw something at them. For those who love me when I die will not praise me, but pray that my sins be forgiven.
When I die, my relationships will continue. Indeed, the commandment to love and honor my mother and my father and my grandparents continues to bind me to those who die. And as clearly as it bound me as a good son to go visit them in the nursing home and the hospital, it binds me still to pray for them.
I strated November on a rainy all Souls Day, by going to a florist not far from Saint John’s Cemetery in Worcester and purchasing twenty-four white roses. Over the next couple hours I then visited all of my relatives in Saint John’s Cemetery, putting a flower on each grave, singing the In paradisum and praying for them.
And in my calendar, I inscribe the dies natales, the day of birth unto eternal life, of each of my parents, grandparents and godparents, so that I can offer Mass for them on those days. Why? So that God will forgive whatever sins they may have committed and lead them home to himself. Or, as we prayed at my mother’s funeral:
O God, who alone are able to give life after death, free your servant Marguerite Mary from all sins, that she, who believed in the Resurrection of your Christ, may, when the day of resurrection comes, be united with you in glory.
Free your servant from her sins! Kyrie eleison! That is the prayer and the work we owe to the dead. For, as Saint Augustine once preached:
"…there is no doubt that the dead are helped by the prayers of the Holy Church, by the saving sacrifice, and by alms dispensed for their souls; these things are done that they may be more mercifully dealt with by the Lord than their sins deserve."
So let us end the month of November as we began it, by praying of the dead, begging God to forgive their sins. And while we are at it, let us ask God to forgive us our sins and lead us to everlasting life.
