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Feast of All Souls Jn 6/37-40 |
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| Background: Liturgists have yet to make up their minds that they serious about reading a Gospel each year. Thus, after eleven months of studying St. Mark's Gospel (interrupted in the summer by several Sundays of St. John), the liturgical year ends with three interruptions this month of the concluding readings of St. Mark - the Feast of All Souls, the Feast of the Consecration of St. John Lateran in Rome, and the Feast of Christ the King. Whatever the merits of these feasts might be, they destroy the continuity of the readings from Mark and pre-sent a difficult challenge for the homilist who is trying to sustain some continuity in his reflections on St. Mark. Today's Gospel, selected from one of St. John's mystical discourses, is aimed at reassuring his community which is suffering because it has been excluded from the local synagogue. It repeats the belief of Jesus (and the Pharisees) in the Resurrection of the Dead. The feast of All Souls is a Christianization of the ancient Celtic festival of Sahmain, the beginning of winter in the Celtic lands, a time when the boundary lines between this world and the Many-Colored-Lands were thin and the dead and the living were in close touch with one another. |
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Story: The film Flatliners from several years ago is an excellent purgatorial story. A group of medical students induce near death experiences in one another to solve the puzzle of what lurks after death. They never get beyond judgment; each of them is forced to face some terrible reality in their life for which they must seek forgiveness. The two most frightening experiences are of Kiefer Sutherland who must find forgiveness from a boy for whose death he has been responsible and Julia Roberts who must forgive her father, a career army noncom who killed himself when his daughter found him using heroin. Both characters represent all of us: we must seek forgiveness and forgive, even across the boundaries of death. The theme of the film and of today's feast is that forgiveness is possible even if death has intervened. It is another version of the church's teaching of the Communion of Saints - the unity of the human community is finally not fractured by death. Today in our prayers for the dead we seek forgiveness and forgive. |
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