In this Year of Mercy, and in this recurring month of November, praying for the Holy Souls shouldn’t elude us, for it is one of the seven Spiritual Acts of Mercy. We can never lose out in praying for them, we are most certainly rewarded and enlarged spiritually, for they pray for us, but can do nothing more for themselves. Equally, our charity toward them develops within our souls, as does our love for God, and renders us enhanced and worthier individuals.
Praying for those who have died and certainty in the reality of Purgatory, were well proven in the Church from the first times. Indeed, the Church Fathers insisted that the practice of prayers for the dead came from the Apostles themselves.
Be aware that Our Mother in Heaven is the most powerful intercessor for the souls in purgatory! She is interceding and offering our prayers to God unceasingly, and she is more than willing to perfect and embellish our prayers, before they reach the ear of Her Son, Jesus.
Praying for our loved ones is a way of wiping away any separation, even that of death. When in real prayer, and by this we need to understand that prayer isn’t simply a matter of speed, or even of speech. For like love, it is not so much a deed as an attitude – a habit of relaxed listening allowing God to enter our souls by all paths, and so establish His presence there. Failure to listen slowly reduces the love of God in our own heads.
So we sit in God’s presence tonight, here in his mother’s Shrine, in the company of someone or many we love profoundly, even if that or those individual(s) have gone before us into death. Why simply reserve our prayer for the dead to the first Eucharistic prayer when we ask the Lord to remember ‘those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.’ And we should beg of ourselves, do I pray for the dead? – and then – But am I rightly present when I do so? For this modest phrase expresses two very significant things about the Christian analysis of death and the life to come. Firstly; those who have gone before us, who we remember tonight, were indeed ‘marked with the sign of faith’.
For this must exchange our vision of what death means for them and for us. For distinct from many individuals, currently, who see death merely as final physical conclusion and severance; we view death as a full and final joining with the death of Christ in whom we are ordained to rise again. For this is the sign of faith with which we are marked.
There are significant outcomes in the way we reflect on our relatives, friends and others who have died. Resembling the saints we remembered in the past, the faithful departed are those who have died in the grace of God. Yes; they may still anticipate their ultimate perfection, but they can no longer fall from God’s grace. It has been given to them irrevocably and conclusively.
In the beautiful old hymn (They are waiting for their petitions, silent and calm); this awaiting this final perfection, is their Purgatory. Purgatory is definitively NOT visited pain that people have to pass through to get to heaven; rightly seen, this is a consoling belief.
‘We must not fashion purgatory into a flaming isolation camp on the brink of hell, or even, a ‘hell for a short time.’ It is actually blasphemous to think of it as a place where a mean minded, resentful God, exacts the last pound or ounce of flesh. St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic of the 15th century, wrote that the ‘fire’ of purgatory is God’s love ‘burning’ the soul so that, at last, the soul is wholly aflame. No longer will the individual be tepid. ‘Purgatory shows most fully, Almighty God’s great mercy and it rinses away all the defects of those longing to become one with Him’. St. Josemaria Escriva.
It is the pain of wanting to be made totally worthy of One who is seen as infinitely lovable, the pain of desire for union that is now absolutely assured, but not yet fully tasted. Now that individual will be ardently seeking.
But you know the souls in purgatory are just too frequently forgotten by Catholics, and for some it could simply be the desire to, like old prayers, not appear too Medieval. Some of the prayers in the ‘New’ Holy Souls Treasury, available tonight, have been crisped up in their language use for today. After all why would we ever wish to drop these wonderful gems that sustained our forebears.
Regardless the reasons for neglect, it is the constant teaching of the Church that purgatory is real and that there are countless souls in need of our prayers.
My point is a modest one, it is neither to prove purgatory’s existence or to provide theological bases for it. In essence it is to urge you to pray earnestly for the Church in suffering. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the more one longs for anything, the more painful dispossession of it develops. The soul suffers from delay. But it can be relieved by our prayer and action.
These souls who may or may not be our relatives are most definitely our spiritual brothers and sisters, for we are related directly by Baptism in Christ. Archbishop Fulton Sheen said of purgatory, ‘among other things, that is where the love of man, tempers the injustice of man.
Growth for us is an indispensable element in life. We grow, not simply physically, but also as individuals, and we grow also into maturity. We know growth can be painful as we go through different editions of ourselves, but we comprehend that to become fully developed we must transform and mature. There cannot be inertia. However, in our lives few of us achieve complete maturity; we are frequently privately conscious that we have not fully become the people we were created to be, falling short in myriad of ways, we recognize we still have a long way to go! And if we do not then we are delusional!
But will we, even at the hour of our death, have reached that fullness of life, that wholeness, which Christ calls us to? If you have not commenced a journey into questioning or knowing about your own faith, or grown in spirituality, the answer will be a negative one.
One way of thinking about Purgatory is to see it as an occasion offered by God whereby even after death there is opportunity to grow into the fullness of Christ. In other words, Purgatory is a tremendous example of or school of God’s mercy, rather than the torture-chamber we have sometimes imagined it to be. So when we pray for our relatives and friends who have died, we are not praying that they will be speedily released from some horrendous torment; we pray instead that their union with Christ which began during their lives on earth, will be brought to absolute perfection in Him, blessed Mother, help us comprehend and to fully contemplate this reality.
The collective way we might think of the dead is that they are ‘those who have gone before us’. The established view of death in our society is that it is a solitary enterprise; each requires to face death in isolation. This isn’t the Christian view, not one Christian dies alone. For we are members of the Body of Christ, which includes the members of the Church here on earth, and those who have died. They are part of the communion of saints, linked to every member of the Body of Christ: The saints in heaven and ourselves here on earth. That’s why we can pray for them. We must recognize this in a distinctive way when we receive Holy Communion.
In binding ourselves to the Lord through the Eucharist we are also fusing ourselves to those who have gone before us, for they, too, are united to him.
Our prayer tonight should be that they may grow more deeply into that love which binds us all together in Christ, and so grasp the breadth of life which Christ confirmed to those who believe in him.
Not one of us here tonight, is free from the loss of a loved one! In this we form a community that is immensely powerful for those who cannot help themselves. Pray, pray more, and pray continually for as St. Padre Pio said: ‘We must empty purgatory with our prayers’.
Our smallest of sacrifices by praying would be worth it if we could but once glimpse one dear soul entering heaven through the benefit of your prayers, if you were lucky enough, your dearest desire would be to spend the rest of your life on your knees praying for them. It can be as simple as the brief Requeim Æternam prayer: ‘Eternal rest, grant to them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen’.
Getting a MASS said for the Holy Souls, is one of the finest ways of praying for them and equates monetarily to a current output in today’s marketplace, of three coffee’s at Starbuck’s and that includes the card. Purgatory is the experience of the purifying mercy of God, a purifying love utterly consuming all of our defects with its intensity.
To conclude: What will we have learned from this Year of Mercy? What growth has there been in us in this Year of Mercy and self-giving love? If you remember nothing else, remember this! God our Father is not observing us from the outside. He does not wish a peripheral contact with us, which incidentally is what we offer Him most. He wishes to come into us. To be with us in the most profound and intimate union. He wants to really live in us. And He wants this without violating our liberty, or depriving us of our personality.
The result of His mysterious transforming influence is that the more present He is in us, the more we become ourselves, because that is what we are precisely made for. In this special year, before it draws to a close, spend time with Him and let Him enter your soul during exposition. It is never too late for us to change or alter the direction of our lives.
What can you offer Him? If you allow me a suggestion based on where we are and what we are here for: We tend annually to focus on the Holy Souls in this month, and fail them the rest of the year. Have you ever considered adopting a Holy Soul; – to be your particular obligation and commission from this year. You will pray for this soul throughout November and if you feel strong enough at the close of the Month – formalize this contract, and make this soul yours for life. Just consider, the advocate you will have in Heaven when like we viewed earlier; that soul in lifted into Heaven, contemplate it during exposition and let this be your lifelong project stemming from the Year of Mercy.
Requiem Æternam dona eis, Domine
Et lux perpetua luceat eis: Requiescant in pace.
Amen
