Homily for November 1, 2009

Father Tom’s Homily
All Saints – All Souls
November 1, 2009

At the Last Supper Jesus gave his Body and Blood to his disciples in the form of Bread and Wine. In doing so he said to them and to all his disciples, “Do this to remember Me.”
Celebrating the Eucharist is an act of remembering. Remembering Jesus.

From the earliest times, the Christian Community has included these words of Jesus in the Eucharistic Prayer, which we hear in this Eucharist, “Do this to remember Me.”
But in this ancient prayer we remember others as well. The ancient prayer formulas remember Mary our Mother, the martyrs and all the saints.
We also remember all our beloved dead. And all the living.
The Eucharist is a prayer of remembering.

November is a month of remembering. It begins with All Saints and All Souls Day. In this way we remember all who have gone before us beyond death.
All Saints is an inclusive naming of all those who have gone home to heaven. All Souls is a naming of all those who have died and are still enroute to heaven.
If there be a period of purgation, it a passage, not a penitentiary. We must never forget that God loves us more than anyone else.
He would not allow this period of passage to be prolonged, because He longs to have us home with him in heaven.

On today’s feast of All Saints we remember all those who have reached God’s house. This includes the great saints, the martyrs, men/women of holiness.
But it also includes our own ancestors - our family and friends who now live with God in glory.
In a sense death has dis-membered them from us. Now we re-member them. We hold them close to our hearts.

I shall always remember a naming of ancestors in the Eucharistic Prayer at a Mass in Calavera eighteen years ago. It was the first delegation in 1992. There were three of us, Kathy Fries, Eunice Buck and me.
The people asked to have the Mass in an area that had been a war zone of destruction and death. We had the Mass in the shade of a tree about four o’clock on a hot afternoon. There were probably thirty to forty people standing round a small table.
They were mostly women and their children and a few old men. The other men and some women were elsewhere with the people’s army in that mountain area.

At that point in the Eucharistic Prayer where we remember the dead, I asked them if they wished to say the names of their beloved dead, whom they call their martyrs.
After a minute of silence (because they had never done this before), one after another they began to name their dead. The memories were still fresh in their minds because they had endured bombings and massacres in that area.
The naming of family members went on for ten to twelve minutes. I was moved to tears by this powerful act of re-member where there had been such a brutal dis-membering of the families.
It was a litany of their saints.

All Saints and All Souls Days are a celebration of the Communion of Saints. The Communion of Saints expresses the kinship of all God’s children. We are not a crowd, we are family, God beloved family.
The Communion of Saints is a celebration of God’s wondrous mercy that reaches out to everyone and is more powerful than our sins.

God’s mercy is the one thing we are most in need of. All of us: Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Apostles, the martyrs, the holiest saints, you and I – we all desperately need God’s loving mercy.
And it is the one thing we can most count on. It is lavished on all God’s children, great saints and great sinners alike. God never, never gives us on us, no matter how unworthy we may be.

Our beloved dead are wrapped up in God’s mercy, like a child wrapped in a blanket in its mothers’ arms.
Our celebration of the Communion of Saints during these days of November teaches us that we need not be fearful death, because whether in life or in death, we are the beloved of God lovingly wrapped in Mother God’s wondrous mercy.