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We are nearing the end of the liturgical year and as usual, the readings take on a rather apocalyptic note. Just like a famous car advertisement in the 70s, “Different Volks for different folks”, the word “apocalypse” is grasped or understood differently by people. The present picture proposed by popular cinema or TV series appears to drift dramatically towards a dreadful dystopian destiny. Generally, it evokes a world grinding to a halt, brought to its knees by a calamitous viral infection. Movies like “I am Legend” (2007, Chris Rock-slapping Will Smith), “Contagion” (2011, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow” and series like “Walking Dead” (2010)”, “Y: The Last Man” (2021) are just some of offerings that come to mind. What is more chilling is how life appears to readily imitate art. We are still gripped in the vice of a never-receding Covid tsunami that sends us into panic despair each time a new variant surfaces.
This recurring nightmare ties in with the 1st Reading and Gospel because they are also apocalyptic. Even though both readings share similar descriptions of a devastated future, however, their foci are more salvific rather than despair at the catastrophe befalling the world. In other words, the difference between the conception of the future as reflected in popular media and the Gospel is a chasm or a gulf. For example, the gospel of climate change projects a desolate future whereas the readings emphasise the climax of history or temporality. Sadly, the proponents of climate change philosophy have outlined an existence whereby “temporary” time has been elevated to the status of eternity. The moral is, if only we do not “destroy” the environment, we should be able to live on earth forever. This logic operates comfortably within a space where God is not only helpless but rather irrelevant. It simply means that the transformation we desire has to be wrought by us.[1]
That is clearly not the picture drawn by Sacred Scripture. The apocalypse may be cataclysmic but the tone is more of an encouragement in the midst of troubles. In fact, the Gospel was written sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem (AD70). The populace was persecuted, pressed down and pessimistic. To these suffering believers, the message was that God would still be in charge. The backdrop of this cosmic upheaval is the “eschaton”, that is, the consummation of time. It points to a future when the Saviour will return to wrap up the work of salvation. Thus, the end of the world, calamitous or not, should be welcome because our salvation is at hand.[2]
However, swirling in this whirlpool of an ongoing climate crisis, it is easy to confuse the current environmental crisis with the end of the world. The conflation of the two can blind us from recognising the eschaton as an event of salvation rather than of damnation. Given that we are force-fed a daily diet of ecological degradation that will ultimately end tragically, the question is, what should our response be?
At the most basic level, in our live-a-day world, we must accept our responsibility towards the environment. Pope Francis when he met the President of Ecuador stressed that we ought to, “Take good care of creation. St. Francis (of Assisi) wanted that. People occasionally forgive, but nature never does. If we do not take care of the environment, there is no way of getting around it”. Through concerted actions we contribute to the sustenance of our common home.
But still, the scriptural end of the world, which is a reminder to render a good account of ourselves, is not and cannot be restricted to merely matters concerning environmental justice. Many of us can recall when we straddled the turn of the millennium and how gripped we were by the Y2K conundrum. It was a good thing that we were not millennials in the sense of “millenarianism”. We were just terrified at the prospect of the global computational highway grinding to a halt. While such a situation could have heralded a disastrous end, what is more relevant to us is located in the 1st Reading. There will be judgement which separates the evil-doers from those who are faithful to the Lord.
The end of time flashes before us the four last things—death, judgement, heaven and hell. To embrace a vision in which we need to “save” the world for the future may just miss the point of the “eschaton”. Without a vision of a life beyond the impermanent, beyond what is passing, we will be grasping at the straws of transience.
In conclusion, we may have imbued too much of eternity into this passing world. While climate change is crucial to the long-term impact of a world that should be habitable for future generations, we do not sufficiently give enough thoughts to the end of the world as a reckoning of our lives. Whatever the shape of the near future, each one of us will have to face the end of time via two possible paths. The remote route is really the end of world when creation will cease to exist. The more proximate passage is when we die. There is a far greater chance that we will die before the Parousia, that is, before the 2nd Coming. The distracting dilemma is when the immediate concern for the environment enters the picture. It is justifiably so for in the last decade we have been socialised to fear the end associated with a disaster of ecological proportion. That has blinded us to the need to face our “end of time” which is when we die.
Any disaster is always an invitation to self-inspection because our actions vis-à-vis nature have consequences. However, our thoughts must span the sustainability of life on earth and the salvation of our souls in heaven. Caring for ecology is also caring for the state of our souls. What Pope Francis said about nature is true. But it is to the peril of our souls if we associate the environmental destruction as the end of the world. As Jesus Himself aptly reminded us in Mk 8: 36 and as St Ignatius himself warned St Francis Xavier, we can paraphrase: “What profits mankind if he saves the environment but loses his soul?”.
Survival on earth and salvation of our souls are not mutually exclusive. Even though we are living in the last days, we should never confuse it with the end of time. Let us remember that the Incarnation has ushered us into the last days where God speaks to us through His Son (and through His Church). Even though these times may be tumultuous, just like in the 1st Reading and the Gospel, we are assured because the Incarnation is God’s eternal covenant of love and faithfulness with us. In fact, in the midst of the confusion surrounding change, at the turn of the last millennium, St John Paul II exhorted us to “Duc in altum”. Put out into the deep for despite the uncertainty of the times, we can trust that God will always be great in His love. We should always face the future with a joyful confidence that whatever comes to us or at us, God will always be there. Be not afraid.
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[1] Bio-engineering is gearing for this, egged on by the religion of youthfulness. Consider all the pills and potions available that give in to the lie that human biological does not obey the laws of nature but instead can overcome the passage of time.
[2] Do we desire heaven? Or closer to the sad truth is that we do not really care that much for heaven. Life is good here. Life is too good here.
Let me start with the request for a funeral for a deceased from a Catholic family. This does not refer to someone who died a Catholic but has a family which is from other faiths. With regard to a Catholic deceased from a Catholic background, it is fascinating how the family goes through the motion. The family is barely practising. None goes to Church yet they insist on having a Catholic funeral rite. This characterisation not a criticism but an invitation to reflect on the meaning of what a funeral is supposed to be.
There is a Quaker quote that goes like this: “I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any person; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again”. Have you ever missed a chance of helping another person? Public transport is a good place to start. For fear of what the other passengers might think (loser!), one shies away from offering one’s seat but sometimes when one has worked up the courage, the moment is gone.
That is how death works.
Death closes the door to any good that one can do. In other words, regret is of no use and those who find themselves in a position too late to do anything, their only recourse is to depend on others, most especially on their prayers and sacrifices which is why we have the beauty of the Communion of Saints. Our faith binds us together. Those who have died and are in glory, those who have died and are waiting, those who are still labouring on earth are united as one Body of Christ. The Saints or the Church triumphant, known or unknown, whom we commemorated yesterday, apart from enjoying the beatific vision help us with their intercession. The Souls in purgatory, the Church suffering, are those who have died in God’s grace and friendship but have not been perfectly purified. They are unable to do anything for themselves even though they can pray for us, the Church militant, who are still working out our salvation on earth.
Purgatory is therefore a needed station or an existential state for souls on their pilgrim way to God simply because “nothing unclean will enter the presence of God in heaven” (Rev 21:27). They may not have mortal sins but they may still have impurities, especially venial sins and also, they may need to undergo justified temporal punishment even though their sins have already been forgiven.
How to explain this?
You remember the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Dismas was promised eternity because he repented and yet Jesus did not commute his punishment. He was forgiven and assured of his place in heaven and yet he still hung on the cross. The simple explanation is that sins have consequences and sometimes the effects of one’s sin drag on. A good illustration is the sin of gossip. So many believe that it is an innocuous sin. When we have smeared someone’s name, even after we have stopped and repented of our sin, the damage to the reputation continues because we cannot control the mouths of others.
Temporal punishment is the price we pay for our sins even though we have repented and are forgiven. King David, who repented of his sin of adultery was forgiven by God, but still, he suffered the death of his child as a consequence of his sin. It sounds frighteningly alien as if God were calculative, vengeful and waiting to exact His pound of flesh. Our notion of a merciful God, sadly, does not admit of justice as one of His attributes. God should be merciful but He cannot be just because we cannot take it.
Perhaps it makes more sense to recognise that underneath sin and punishment is the heavy and inconvenient truth of repercussion for our actions or lack of. Sin is not merely violating a law or command but damaging a relationship with God. When there is damage, there is bound to be consequences. What we need to do is to mend the relationship through sorrow, repentance, prayers, sacrifices, penance and acts of charity. In that way, purgatory is both a merciful gesture of God and it is also just, given by God for the possibility for repairing our relationship with Him.
This means that souls do languish or linger in purgatory because they are waiting for their purification and their turn to go heaven. What helps them is our sacrifices and prayers. In short, our assistance fulfils the basic principle of the Church’s practice of indulgences—we help those who have died to commute or shorten their temporal punishment due to sins. One of the corporal acts of mercy is to assist in the burying of the dead. One of the spiritual acts of mercy is to pray for the living and the dead.
This brings me back to the insistence of a Catholic funeral for a deceased of whom the family is not practising. A funeral is not really for the dead. They do not care for the coffin or whatever elaborate eulogy that is prepare for them. They have crossed a portal from which there is no return to right whatever wrong they may have done. And from where they are, they long for the final reconciliation with God. Our duty is to pray that their reunion can happen sooner rather than later.
If you are sure that after death, you will be in heaven, good for you. I am happy for you. Me, I am conscious that I have booked a place in purgatory, if not in hell first. We have been promised too much by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. According to “One Sweet Day”, the passage from death to eternity seems to be automatic because we have confused forgiveness with forgetfulness. Bonhoeffer defined “cheap grace” as the “preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without Church discipline. Communion without Confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ”. In other words, we want Jesus to be the Saviour. We hesitate to follow Him as the Lord.
All Souls’ Day, apart from the call to pray for the dead, functions just like all funerals. It is a memento mori. A style of iconography, that is, a kind of painting of Saints, is centred on the theme of memento mori. These paintings often depict the saints near to instruments of their death or being reminded of death. That is the meaning of memento mori—a reminder of death. I saw a picture yesterday of St Francis of Assisi, kneeling, in prayer, holding on one hand, a skull. This memento mori invite us to think of our own death. On All Souls’ Day, the epitaph on the tomb that says, “Where you are, I once was. Where I am, you will be” beckons us to do the good we need to, to repent our lives before it is too late. It is a reminder to us who are living not to waste any opportunity so that our purgatory will be shorter rather than longer.
Those who are not practising but want a Catholic funeral fail to understand the role that funeral plays. It is a reminder to us that time is short. Better prepare for a holy death than not because one day we will be in a box.
You know we are approaching November when the movies start turning creepy and dark. Halloween is basically the season for the scary and spooky. But the word itself points to the traditional Catholic feast of “All Hallow’s Eve” which refers to the eve of the Solemnity of All Saints. The present shape of Halloween has little to do with sanctity. Instead, it is a season of excess, that is, of children eating sweets until they are sick.
Halloween actually belongs to an essential component of the Liturgical Year and that is the Sanctoral Cycle. We are used to the movement of time through the various seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Ordinary, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. What we may have neglected is that weaved into the Liturgical Year is the Sanctoral Cycle. At the uppermost, in the celebration of the annual events of Christ's mysteries, we have Mary whom the Church honours with a special love. She is joined by an inseparable bond to the saving work of Christ her Son. As the most excellent fruit of Christ’s redemption, William Wordsworth’s tribute to her, captures it most beautifully. She is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast”. Thus, the Church joyfully contemplates Mary as the faultless image which she, that is the Church, hopes and desires to be.
Apart from venerating the Holy Mother of God, the Church also includes in her annual calendar, days which are devoted to the memories of martyrs and saints. They are raised to the altar of sanctity only by the grace of God and from where they are, they sing God’s perfect praise in heaven. More than that, they offer prayers for us.
Many of us are familiar with the oft-repeated definition of what a Sacrament is and it is helpful to understand why we are celebrating Halloween. What is a Sacrament? Outward sign of inward grace. What does that mean? Firstly, the foundation of our sacramental theology is based on an event. It is the Incarnation. At its most basic, the Incarnation describes the “Word becoming Flesh”. There is a shrine in Italy where if you were there, you should visit. Imagine yourself standing in the Holy House of Loreto as the Angelus bell is rung and the prayer is recited as if for the first time: “Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est”. The scriptural quote is visibly emblazoned on the skirt of the altar. “Here the Word was made Flesh”. That is the bedrock for the Church’s sacramental structure.
In other words, it is because of the Incarnation, that is, God taking on materiality, that we have the Sacraments, meaning that, materiality has the power of conveying the divine. In this vein, a sacrament is a visible reality that hides an invisible truth. Jesus is sometimes described of as the Sacrament of the Father because He said, “to have seen me is to have seen the Father”. In Orthodox iconography, there is no depiction of God the Father because to see Him, Jesus, is to behold the Father. In like manner, the same can be said of the Saints in that “to have seen them is to see Christ”.
“By celebrating the passage of these saints from earth to heaven the Church proclaims the paschal mystery achieved in the saints who have suffered and been glorified with Christ; she proposes them to the faithful as examples drawing all to the Father through Christ, and through their merits she pleads for God's favours”. (Sacramentum concilium 104). In summary, the Church proposes the saints as “sacraments” of Christ.
But what happened?
Firstly, our experience of the saints is fundamentally functional. We barely know our saints except for the “useful” ones. Can you guess the name of the next new parish? Possibly Divine Mercy (granted the title does not belong to a saint) or the saint that is associated with the Divine Mercy. St Faustina. Why? She brings in the pilgrims and the money. It is sounds horribly cynical but our approach to the saints is quite mercenary.
Secondly, perhaps it is not as telling as it is inevitable that we have become mercenary. The onset of the Reformation also kicked in the long process of desacralisation of the Church. It began with the removal of statues of the saints. I entered a former Catholic Church about 40 years ago, now a Calvinist church in Geneva and it was totally bare. I was in York Minster in 2014, now an Anglican Cathedral in the UK. What struck me was the pantheon of saints’ statues, all decapitated. It is ironic that they lopped off the heads of the saints but retained the heads of the monarch. Somehow, they is scant realisation that the retention of the heads of the monarchs contradicts their sanction against idolatry.
Sadly, the march of desacralisation quickened after Vatican II and it matches the pace of “desacramentalisation”. We did away with a lot more of the “material” component of the sacraments and sacramentals preferring a more “spiritual” approach believing that God is more disposed to the interior rather than to the exterior. A glaring example is clothing. In the past, we dressed up appropriately for Mass. Now we hear the usual argument that God does not care what you wear. He is more interested in what is in your heart.
A good development is the recognition that they had been a process of desacralisation because they have brought back the prayer of exorcism in some of the rites. Notably the blessing of water. There was no reference to demonic presence in the post-Vatican II rite. In the restored blessing, exorcism is conducted because of a realisation that Satan’s arena of operation is not restricted to the spiritual realm. To understand this, one must ask the question: What does it mean when we proclaim Jesus as Saviour? From what is He saving us? He is Saviour because there is a possibility that we might go to hell.
Furthermore, in tandem with the desire for ecumenical rapport with our separated brothers and sisters, we tended to “downplay” our “saints” so that we do not appear to be “idolatrous”. This side-lining or emptying of the Church of saints is “disincarnational” and it has a deleterious effect on the life of the Church.
It is true, as St Jerome said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. We accept that the Lord is best known through sacred scripture. However, Pope St Leo in Sermo 74,2 remarked, “What was visible in our Saviour has passed over into His mysteries” meaning that “everything that Jesus did to reconcile us to God, has passed over to the Sacraments”.[1]
We have forgotten that Jesus Christ is also scripted in the Saints. They are lived examples of His teachings. They are the flesh and blood of what it means to be Christ in the world. Perhaps it is much easier when the “outward sign” loses its material basis that our Masses can now be online. We would not have adapted that quickly to “online” Masses if we were not already steeped in a disincarnational spirituality. I am not interested in criticising the popularity of online Masses but note that long before we dove deep into online Masses, we were already swimming in the waters of a disincarnated spirituality. “Halloween” has truly become “Holloween”. When saints are driven out of “All Hallows”, you can understand why it is easy for children to dressed up as devils rather than as saints.
To go deeper into Christ and who He is, we must recover the sense of the Saints. Otherwise, in trying to be faithful to Christ, we have already “emptied” Him of His real content which is visible in the saints we venerate and love. Not just the famous ones but also the unknown ones. Ask any one of our children if they know the life of a saint intimately? St Ignatius of Loyola who recuperating from a cannon ball that shattered his legs were begging for more racy literatures. In the Castle, they only had the Lives of the Saints and the Imitatio Christi. In his recovery, he imagined, “If St Francis of Assisi did this and if St Dominic did that, I can too”. He became a saint because he was inspired by other saints.
What is All Saints’ Day? It is a supposedly a Day of Obligation. But is it still meaningful? At present we designate this day to be a celebration of all the “unknown” saints of the Church. But it may just be a hollow celebration. It makes a lot more sense if we celebrate the “saints” we know so that we can have a day which we celebrate all the saints we do not know.
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[1] The Greek word “mysterion” was translated into Latin as “mysterium” and “sacramentum”.
