ALL SOULS

Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch, 'All Souls Day' (1910)

   ‘The souls of the faithful departed’. What does it mean, and what do we do with them? Where are they? Up there? Out there? Down there? Nowhere? For all our advances in knowledge of the Universe, we have no idea. The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, is undiscovered still. All we know for sure is what Jesus told the Good Thief, from cross to cross: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise’. That thief is one of those we remember today.

   So what we do with them is remembrance. That they be not forgotten. Lest we forget. Being forgotten, we sense, is the worst that can happen to one who has died, in this world. We remember our own dead men and women: parents, spouses, friends, sometimes and grievingly, children; we remember them with affection, we sometimes miss them, sometimes not; we re-call them, call them up in our minds, their faces, their voices (often the hardest to remember), their way of walking, their eccentricities; and in doing so we realise that we live in a web of the living and the dead, that the unforgotten are still with us, that we are not alone.

   And yet, as the Bible text on famous men reminds us, there are those who are forgotten, as individuals. Them we remember as members of a larger unit: those who died in the inferno of World War I, the numberless martyrs killed by tyrants and by the enraged because of their faith in God, those small ordinary folk who never got into the news or the history books but lived their faith truly and kindly in a corner of Dorset, of the Alsace, of Pomerania, of Tuscany or of Massachusetts. These we re-member: we put them together again, we imagine them again, we bring them briefly back to the life they departed, in order to honour them as they were perhaps not honoured before.

   Where they are, we don’t know. But we trust, which is the essence of faith and hope. We trust that they are in the warmth and light and joy of the Presence of God. We trust that they are filled with the happiness they deserved. We trust that, perhaps, we too may join them there. One day. One eternal Day.