I’ve always liked the way that the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls come as a pair. All Saints seems to speak to the grandeur of church, the great sweep of history including the lives and deaths of so many extraordinary women and men. And we are part of that. We are amongst those extraordinary people, a chosen people.
All Souls is somehow more intimate, more personal. It speaks to our particular relationships, the people we have been close to, the people who we miss because they aren’t with us in this world any longer. Although they are still with us.
Both of these Feasts tell us we are part of something much bigger than our short individual lives. For the early Israelites the sense of a short and often hard life was very real. Many of the writings in the Hebrew Scriptures give expression to that sense of fragility and impermanence. But they also tell of the hope that grew in that harsh soil (Wisdom 3:1-9). That’s why they still speak to us thousands of years later:
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace.
In our own times some of us have had the good fortune of lives that were easier, at least physically, without constant hunger or fear of violence. But if loss comes to us, whether because of the violence of people or of a world we don’t control, we still struggle to deal with that. In a way we are less fortunate than those people long ago because we have grown accustomed the illusion we are in control – in control of our lives, of our world, of what happens to us.
Some of that is true. We do have more control over time and space – we travel distances with an ease that would have been inconceivable to people even a hundred years ago let alone thousands. We have greatly increased capability to use the resources of the world around us, for good and for ill. We have so much more understanding of our bodies and how to protect them and care for them.
But in the end we are not in control. When we remember those who are no longer with us we also have to recognize that we are subject to the same fate. The question is how we respond to that reality, that ultimate shared experience of all people. Do we give up and say it’s all meaningless, that we have a brief appearance in this world and that’s it? Or do we hold on to the words of Jesus and accept that there is something more, that despite our profound lack of understanding he is still looking out for us, that we are still connected with those who have been close to us, that there is something more: “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life”. (John 6:37-40)