Isaiah 25:6-9 / Romans 5:5-11 / John 6:37-40
In our modern world, the advancement of technology is supposed to make our lives easier and more convenient.
But it seems that technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. (Aldous Huxley)
It is said that men have become the tools of their tools. (Henry David Thoreau). In other words, instead of making use of technology, it is becoming the other way round – technology is making use of us.
The expression of this is in the two phrases we use almost every day: “I am busy” and “I have no time”.
In a way, we envy those who have passed on, especially when we pray for them in these words: Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.
So we pray that the departed will rest in peace. We hope that they will rest in peace.
But are they really resting in peace? And that is the question that we are to think about as we join the Church to commemorate the faithful departed on this day.
This commemoration is associated with the doctrine that the souls of the faithful who at death have not been cleansed from the temporal punishment due to sin and from attachment to mortal sins.
They cannot immediately attain the joys of heaven, and they may be helped to do so by prayer and by the sacrifice of the Mass. In other words, when they died, they had not yet attained full sanctification and moral perfection, a requirement for entrance into Heaven. This sanctification is carried out in Purgatory.
There is the practice that the entire month of November became associated with prayer for the departed; lists of names of those to be remembered were being placed in the proximity of the altar on which the sacrifice of the Mass is offered.
A legend is given by Peter Damiani in his “Life of St. Odilo”: a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a cleft that was “communicating” with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, in rescuing their victims.
It may be just a legend, but the truth of it is that our prayers for the faithful departed has its efficacy in helping them to purify themselves for heaven.
Yes, souls in Purgatory need our prayers otherwise today will just be a day we remember our departed loved ones and nothing else.
On All Souls Dy, we not only remember the departed, but we apply our efforts, through prayer, almsgiving, and the Mass, to their release from Purgatory.
We do this by coming to church for Mass and by visiting cemetery or columbarium and offering a prayer for the souls in Purgatory.
For the parish, we will go over later to our parish columbarium to bless the niches of the departed as an expression of asking for God’s blessings on them so that they will be purified and gain entry into heaven.
Praying for the departed is a Christian obligation. In the modern world, when many have come to doubt the Church's teaching on Purgatory, the need for such prayers must increase and has increased, as can be seen by the high numbers of Mass offerings for the faithful departed and the attendance at Mass today.
In our modern world, with all the technology, we are still busy and have no time.
But today we have taken time to remember and pray for the faithful departed and our departed loved ones.
All the technology can’t help them. Only we can help them with our prayers so that they can truly rest in peace.
And the time will come when we will need the prayers of the living to help us attain eternal rest.