Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (2025)

In our country we celebrate Memorial Day and we have other special days that commemorate those who lost their lives, such as the anniversary of 9/11. But what we celebrate this day is different. We are doing more than merely recalling a person’s life or an event. Today is about is acknowledging death as part of this life as we know it but further acknowledging the promise Jesus holds for us, and our loved ones to the fullness of life with him after death.

Our Christian tradition has a history of going to the sacred sites where witnesses to the faith are buried and celebrating the Eucharist there. And so, in this Mass we make our Lord present in the Eucharist here in this sacred place, mindful of our beloved dead.

Death is so familiar to us and so close. It’s part of every human life, and yet it’s so contrary to our sense of what is right and what is good. Why? Because in our deepest core, instinctively within, we know death is not truly natural. As the Book of Wisdom tells us, “God did not make death…he fashioned all things that they might have being” (1:13-14). Death found its way to us by virtue of a trick played upon our fore-parents in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:1-3). And of all the ways that God’s order of things came unraveled, the gravest of all disorders in the universe is death.

In some sense this Mass is for us, the living, to offset the ways that death as an abstract reality, offends our sense of God’s order. We see the effect of how it troubles us, in how many people avoid talking about it or don’t want to say the word. Instead, we’ll say, “She passed away” or maybe even, “She expired”, as though we’re speaking about a carton of milk.

Yes, death confounds us on a personal level. Some of you are dealing with the great weight of a recent death. Some of us still have a hollow spot in our hearts that remains after years. Some of us are perhaps dealing with the difficulties of a loved one who is presently dying, or perhaps even facing your own steps toward death.

We need this feast day to remember that death does not get the last word. All Soul’s Day beckons us to acknowledge death and yet cling in certain hope to what Jesus promised us. I can’t imagine what it must be to be an atheist, where death means the end of one’s existence—not so different from a carton of milk after all.

But while this Mass is for us, the living, it is also for our beloved dead. We pray for them and celebrate this Mass for the dead; to move them toward the heaven He has always desired for them.

For whatever way they left this life without having entirely pure hearts, we pray that these hearts become pure now. For any ways our loved ones fought against God’s love—just as we all do—even in the most subtle ways, we pray that they simply surrender, and let God’s love go to work: refining like gold that is heated so that all its impurities fall away. We pray that beautiful purifying love of God would bring them back to the beautiful idea of what God always knew them to be: beautiful, pure, and thus truly ready to enter the fullness of His presence.

We call that process purgation or more commonly, purgatory. And for whatever way it’s been misunderstood, or we distorted its teaching, let us simply understand it simply as God’s loving and merciful response to our sin.

May our prayers be like wind that fills a ship’s sails, moving them toward heaven. It’s a beautiful and privileged response of our prevailing love. And may our prayers bring consolation, knowing that death is not the worst thing that can happen; the worst is separation from Jesus, who is the Way. Let us, in this Eucharist, pray that through his death and Resurrection, he becomes the Way for our beloved dead.

Go forth, Christian soul, from this world:

In the name of God the almighty Father, who created you,

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, who suffered for you,

In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out for you…

May you live in peace this day, may your home be with God in Zion,

with Mary, the virgin Mother of God, with Joseph, and all the angels and saints.

Go forth, faithful Christian.