All Souls’ Day: Out of the Depths We Cry, and We Are Heard
Yesterday the Church stood on tiptoe. We kept All Saints and looked up at the great crowd who have finished the race and now see God face to face. Today the Church kneels down. On the second of November we keep the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, and we turn with great tenderness to those who have died and are not yet home.
These two days are not opposites. They are one movement of the same heart. Yesterday was hope. Today is love, and love has work to do.
Out of the Depths
For centuries the Church has carried one psalm on her lips on this day, and it begins in the dark: “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord” (Psalm 130:1).
Notice what that verse does not do. It does not pretend the depths are not there. It does not tell the grieving to cheer up. It takes the lowest place a human being can occupy, the place of loss and helplessness, and from the bottom of it, it shouts upward. And the whole of our faith rests on this: that the shout is heard.
If you have buried someone, you know those depths. The empty chair, the phone number you cannot bring yourself to delete, the date in the calendar that comes round every year. Today the Church does not ask you to climb out of that. She asks you to pray from inside it, and she prays alongside you.
Why Catholics Pray for the Dead
Praying for the dead is not a late invention or a piece of folk piety. It runs right through Scripture and through the life of the Church from the very beginning.
In the Second Book of Maccabees, Judas Maccabeus has fallen soldiers to bury, and he takes up a collection so that sacrifice may be offered for them. The sacred writer approves, and gives us the line that has echoed down the centuries, that it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins” (2 Maccabees 12:46).
You find the same instinct in St Paul. Writing to Timothy about his friend Onesiphorus, who by every indication had already died, Paul does not simply remember him fondly. He prays for him, that “the Lord grant unto him to find mercy” in that day (2 Timothy 1:18). He speaks of a salvation in which a man may be “saved, yet so as by fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15).
And you find it scratched into the plaster of the catacombs, where the first Christians buried their dead in haste and in danger, and still took the time to write a prayer for them on the wall. We are doing today exactly what they did then.
A Purification, Not a Punishment
Behind all of this lies a doctrine that is often explained badly, so let us explain it well.
Scripture tells us plainly that nothing unclean shall enter heaven (Revelation 21:27). It also tells us that God desires the salvation of every soul. Hold those two truths together and you arrive at what the Church calls purgatory. Most of us, if we are honest, will die genuinely loving God and still carrying things that have no business in His presence. Old resentments. Habits we never quite broke. Love that was real but narrow.
Purgatory is not a second chance, and it is not God changing His mind about someone. It is the final cleansing of a soul already saved, already destined for glory, already His. It is the washing of a child’s face at the door before the feast. It hurts the way healing hurts, and it ends in joy every single time.
And here is the part that should move us. Because those souls are still members of the family, our prayers reach them. The Mass reaches them. That is not sentiment. That is the communion of saints, and it means that love does not stop working when someone stops breathing.
Grief, but Not Without Hope
St Paul writes to a frightened young church about those who have died, and tells them not to grieve “as others who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Read that carefully. He does not say do not grieve. Christians weep. Our Lord Himself wept at the grave of His friend.
What Paul forbids is hopeless grief, and he forbids it because of what Christ said while standing outside that very tomb: “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). Everything we do today stands on that sentence.
And so the Book of Wisdom can say of those we have lost, “The souls of the just are in the hand of God” (Wisdom 3:1). Not in the ground. Not in the past. Not in our memories only. In His hand. And Revelation promises the ending we are praying them towards, when “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).
In Our Parish Today and This Month
Today, Monday 2nd November, there are two Masses here at St Anthony’s. Our Rosary and Holy Mass is at 9:30 AM, and there is a second Mass at 7:00 PM for those who cannot get here in the morning. If you are able to come to either, do come. There is no better thing any of us can do for our dead than to be present at the Holy Sacrifice and to offer it for them.
Two further moments gather the whole parish this month.
The Blessing of the Graves is on Saturday 7th November at 12 noon in Slough Cemetery. We go in together and the graves of our own are blessed. We wrote about why the Church blesses the grave itself in They Are Not Forgotten, and the details are on the event page.
Then the Parish Memorial Mass is on Friday 27th November at 7:00 PM in the church, when we remember our beloved dead and pray for them as one family. Details are on the event page.
If you would like a Mass offered for someone who has died, you can book at the Repository after any weekend Mass, speak to the Parish Office, or hand a note to Fr Nathaniel. All our service times are on the Mass Times page.
A Gift the Church Offers This Week
From the first to the eighth of November, the Church offers a plenary indulgence, applied not to ourselves but to the holy souls, for those who visit a cemetery and pray for the departed. It comes with the usual conditions, which are confession, Holy Communion, and prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father, together with a heart genuinely turned away from sin.
Notice that the Blessing of the Graves on Saturday falls inside that week. If you have been meaning to go to confession, this is a very good reason. Do speak to Fr Nathaniel if you would like to know more.
Something to Do Before Today Ends
Say their names. Out loud, if you can manage it. Your mother, your father, the friend you lost too early, the priest who baptised you, the neighbour nobody else remembers now.
Then pray the prayer the Church has given us for exactly this, the one our grandparents knew by heart:
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.
It takes nine seconds. It reaches further than you will ever know.
May our beloved dead, and all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.