It's All Souls Day for 2024 in Australia. It's also the end of a very busy time working on a number of projects. Now, it is time to reflect and to take stock. This is the beginning of a special season when we take note of the fact that life is more than what we can taste and touch with our senses. There is a certain irony that the time when we remember our dead with our prayers can renew our awareness of life. [Follow the November (Prayers) link to be taken to the daily prayers for the month.]
We live in a culture that cannot see beyond its own nose. The pleasures of a moment are more significant than the substance of life. Again, it's ironic that we consume the prepackaged experiences promoted by those who are most concerned about supporting their own lifestyles. That self concern rubs off on us. Our focus narrows considerably.
But, this season affords us a new opportunity to look beyond ourselves to those who can no longer care for themselves in the most crucial of ways. There is a portion of the Communion of Saints who give praise to God continuously in heaven. They are triumphant. There is that portion that still militantly struggles to realise the Sovereignty of God in our midst. Then, there is that segment of the Communion that suffers through their purgation. They can do nothing about this for themselves. But, we can.
As a Catholic, I have a duty to pray for the dead, especially those who are members of my family. The time that I take to do this is a sacrifice in this busy world. But, our prayers reorient us towards that invisible aspect of our lives. Newman knew this well. As we will see in time, he had to deal decisively with his understanding of this part of the Catholic Faith. This will become increasingly clear as we work through the Dream of Gerontius.
For now, let's consider what the friends are doing for the Dreamer on pages 325-326 [1]. This will give us some idea about how we might pray for both the dying and the dead. The prayers of the Assistants begin with two lines requesting that mercy and grace be granted the Dreamer:
Be merciful, be gracious; spare him, Lord.
Be merciful, be gracious; Lord, deliver him.
There is an interesting affect that Newman gains for us here. We read the first line as we might a litany and begin the second expecting the same pattern. However, we are actually arrested by the change in word order: Lord, deliver him. The sounding of 'Lord' has something of an eternal quality to it. We can literally pause and dwell in this address to God before we finish with the request that the Dreamer be delivered.
This is as it should be. We are not pulling the lever of a vending machine. All true prayer is praise of God.
How is the pause effected? By the rising inflection of 'lor' and the hard 'dee' sound at the end of Lord and the beginning of deliver. It is as if we are suspended in time between two ledges that we are leaping from and towards. When we pray for the dying and the dead, we should recognise that the 'space' into which we are entering is especially God indwelled.
God is merciful and gracious. God is also just and righteous. To sin means to fall short of the glory of God that is our inheritance as His creatures, those whom He created in His image and likeness [2].
We are satisfied with possessing very little of that glory. So, we fail to see the significance of our sin. We should rectify this oversight during our lives. We may not have the grace of doing so at our deaths. And, even if we should die with our friends and family around us, it is still possible to fall to the perils of dying.
It is possible to insist that we are our own 'god'. We can rely on our own merits as tokens to gain us an entrance into paradise, thank you very much. But, is this true? Jesus told a parable about the wedding guest who insisted on wearing his own garments rather than those provided by the host. The guest was debarred from the celebration. The devil is quite good at deceiving us about this.
There is only one who lived and died to the full glory of God, Jesus Christ. That glory was revealed to Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor. The glory of Moses and Elijah faded to nothing in the light that shone from Jesus as the essence of God's glory and not its mere reflection. The second stanza of the prayer of the Assistants lays this out for us. By Christ's birth, death, burial, resurrection and rising to the Father is God's mercy manifest towards us.
As we pray in the power of the Spirit, we praise the God of our salvation and raise our dying friends and family members up to the glory of God that is in Christ Jesus. In doing so, we raise ourselves up to God as well in worship. We thankfully affirm that, in Christ, we too are members of the Communion of Saints. We can continue to raise up our loved ones after their deaths. We commend them to God's mercy in prayer. This is the great grace of this season, a month of remembrance.
| [1] | You can see the poem with this pagination at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/verses/gerontius.html |
| [2] | Saint Irenaus claimed that the Glory of God was man fully alive. |