Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalm 23:1-6
Romans 6:3-9
John 6:37-40

The Flight of Your Soul

This time of year is sometimes known as "Little Triduum" — a three day period when we reflect on the profoundest truth and reality, which is the Kingdom of Heaven and the life everlasting. The proper name is Allhallowstide (that is a very old Catholic name), including the three days of All Hallows Eve (or Hallows E'en); All Hallows Day; and All Souls Day. Both the Greater Triduum and the Lesser remind me of the wall behind the Main Altar in a traditional Catholic church. It is the only place in the church where the geometry departs from right angles and Euclid's reassuring rules for rectangles and triangles. For that space enters the mysterious world of arcs. I say circles are mysterious? Well, did you know that Π (pi), which is the divinely appointed essence of every circle and arc, is also a nanocentury (in seconds), helping us to understand that the circle of the seasons and the circle of our lives are much more than metaphors. They are sacred. They are real. They are enduring. And the wall behind the Altar is a wormhole that connects Earth to Heaven. We call it the "Gate of Heaven." The early Church wrote the word "Paradise" upon this wall to signify its transcendent place in the human lifeworld, where the rules we know suddenly end, and a new world beyond all our calculations begins. This wall is called the apse as in aperture like the aperture of a camera, where a tiny chink in the Church's heavy stones lets in divine light. And by the way, where our picture is taken.

Allhallowstide is a season appointed to accommodate this disjunction between our rulebound world and the Greater Life beyond. It is constructed as one day of preparation followed by a single two-day feast. Why conceive of All Hallows Day (also called All Saints Days) and All Souls Day as one feast? Because we do not have a complete and correct roll of names for All Saints Day. Yes, we may be confident in many names we have — the Beloved Disciple, St. John, and God's Mother, Blessed Mary, Ever-virgin, come to mind — but there are many saints whose names we do not know and many who are called saints, who would profit from our prayers on All Souls Day.

Prayers for the Dead? Yes, this is a doctrine of the Undivided Church. Consider the words of St. John of Damascus (d. 749)

I grew up hearing prayers for the dead, said by Anglo-Catholic priests, that included the phrase "continued growth in the Greater Life." As a boy I found this to be a mysterious phrase, to be sure. And I was fascinated by this idea .... of "the Greater Life." The ancient Catholic Church taught that after death our souls continue in the same dynamic of consenting to sin or being repulsed by it. How else could God know the state of our souls, for anyone who has a soul can tell you that it is a living, dynamic reality, not frozen in one state. It is apt to change in a nanosecond. We understand the burning point of this dynamic in the moment of temptation. We understand how giving in, soiling ourselves, will change us, will affect our spiritual temperature. Recall our earliest temptations in life for those of us who consent to them. The good, innocent, and loving creatures that God made us to be as children .... well, that creature begins to change with the consent to sin. Our spiritual journey begins with this first temptation, and it ends with our last.

After death, according to the third-century Father Eustratius, the state of one's soul is examined through a process of temptations, a last series of temptations. These temptation are different from any we have known before for their purpose is to take our spiritual temperature, to read the state of the soul. On earth, second chances follow our consent to sin, but here no longer. For after death, our career of choices ends. You see, these temptations are simply to take our vital signs. Should we give in to a temptation, we will be taken off to Hell at the moment of our consent. Should we be repulsed by them, we will be advanced to the next temptation, again to examine another dimension of our soul. Just as there are varieties of sin, so there must be varieties of readings of the soul in order to assess our spiritual state of being.

It turns out that all the temptations that preceded us in life have been a series spiritual disciplines readying us for the Last Things, as the Lesser Life, the life on earth, is a brief period leading up to the Greater Life, which is infinitely long. And our conception of Heaven now becomes primary, centrally important. If we understand Heaven to be a place where our every pleasure is to be served up on silver platters, then we will be disappointed and find that we do not "match" with God's Heaven. This is a culture clash, a collision of expectations, of God's for us and of ours for God. And we will be taken off to the destination whose architect was our own unbridled desires. You see, everyone in the end will receive what he or she has desire all along. We will have the "Heaven" which we ourselves conceived. Alternatively, if we are repulsed by each of these visions — ideals of bountiful pleasure of every kind — then the state of our soul will be seen for what it is: God's Heaven. Heaven is a state of being.

It is conventient for us as children to conceive of Heaven as a place, whose streets are paved with gold, where everyone has shoes, but it is not geography or a country, but a state of being. Those who are Heavenly will not need to get their bearings upon reception into this celestial state, for he or she will have already become Heaven before this time. The same is true for people who have become Hellish, who have been become formed in its degradation and glories in it (so to speak). They will discover upon their death that they have been a living Hell all along.

It is the souls in between these boundaries — souls who have not become Heaven nor have they become Hell — these are the people for whom we pray on All Souls Day.

You know the Western's Church conception of the purgation state was conceived as a duration. And this time of purgation might be lessened through monetary contributions. What was the phrase in the Middle Ages? "When a coin into the box doth ring, a soul from purgatory doth spring." But Purgatory is not a place, and it is not a time. How long is a moment in eternity?

May I also pause to address the faithful who believe that we sleep in our graves until a Great Day of Judgment, when each person standing in line will pass by Christ the Judge and simply receive a sentence? I do not make light of this, for as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the founder of the respected journal First Things, said, "This is Roman Catholic orthodoxy and what every good Roman Catholic believes."

But we must remember that God does not live within time. Every point on our earthly timeline is present to God all at once (so to speak). And we should call to mind what Padre St. Pio said: what we behold here on earth is an indecipherable tangle of an infinite number of threads, but on the other side, God's side, is a perfect and simple needlepoint. In particular, the Last Judgment has already taken place in the mind of God. And while God sees all things simultaneously in all places at all points of time, nonetheless, humans mysteriously are granted a gift of freedom that cannot be abridged. God's foreknowledge does not compromise our ability to choose. And our free choice is of paramount importance at the moment we are tempted to sin.

By the way, if you cannot get past the mindbending paradox of God's foreknowledge and our freedom to choose, then I suggest you begin a course of reading in Quantum Physics, for even more mindbending depictions of our lifeworld. In particular, according to contemporary physicists, deterministic causality is on the scrap heap (to the unending delight of a soul named David Hume!).

I have suggested that our temptations throughout life have been our training ground for Heaven. But, of course, the case is much broader than this. Our lives themselves, in every, detail are instances of sacred literature. Each story is holy as it begins from God and completes in God. Yes, there are places along the winding road that are not so holy, and this is where our most concentrated spiritual training happens. As each of our lives is a holy book, it follows that we are charged with reading that book, underlining key sentences, marking off key paragraphs, adding marginalia, circling key words. This book has a surface or literal meaning, which we call the plot. It has characters, who are our family and friends and strangers. And it also has a hidden meaning, which we call the spiritual meaning or allegorical meaning. That is, there are recurring themes that help us to see deeper struggles, deeper probings into the divine, deeper resolutions within ourselves. The story is also an eschatological story as each one looks forward to the Eschaton and the Last Judgment. And this will be the subject matter for each of our final judgments. You might say, we have taken a lifelong literature course in literature, and our Final Judgment is the final exam. Yes, there will be students who sit for this exam who did not bother reading or understanding the only book this all-important course required. They do not bother to look at the only book on the syllabus, but the God Who loves us comes to our aid anyway.

Among my most illuminating assignments was the high privilege accorded me as chaplain to the dying. In preparation for this, I took a semester-long course at my university's nursing school, "On Death and Dying." It was taught by doctors and nurses at the university's tertiary care hospital and by faculty at the school of nursing. It was an amazing course. When I began serving the patients arriving to an oncology ward at a large Roman Catholic medical center, I was deeply impressed by the attention each patient was giving his or her life. I saw it in every room. Wives of fifty and sixty years would tell me, "He's never talked about these things before! You couldn't pry it out him!" I recall one patient who was obsessed with returning to Hoboken, NJ. He asked anyone he saw if they would take him to Hoboken. Volunteers and nurses serving hospice patients soon realized that "story collecting" or autobiography was the main activity of this place. So they helped the patients to make "life books" with photographs, sketches, snatches of cloth, pressed flowers from proms, anything that might serve the purpose.

Learning that this sudden, prepossessed interest in one's life story was seen everywhere, an in all hospices, I began reflecting. I recalled ... that People who had fallen out of planes and survived or who had experienced other close calls and lived to tell the tale, all of these people would say, "My whole life passed before my eyes. They literally saw a compressed "movie" of their whole lives. And why? Because our loving God does not want us to enter the final examination completely unprepared. For our lives, ourselves as we really are, as God alone is able to see us, will be the subject matter of this interview.

The marvel is that we earth-dwellers who gather on this day are still writing our stories! In order to write a decent literary work, future entries must be answerable to previous ones. We must resolve the actions, especially the troubling actions, that are yet to be reconciled. If our main character has wandered into the wood of error, we must figure out how to get him back on track. What sort of book ends with the main character lost in the wood of error?! And we know where each and every story is supposed to end, which gives us an enormous advantage over other authors. It ends with God and in God in a mysterious (we pray) unity. As our exemplar and brother, the First-born of Heaven and Earth, has become One with the Father, so the Father and the Son desire that we also become One with them (John 17). How do we do this? By living our lives ... mindfully, reflectively, and ever focused on the knowledge and love of God.

Christianity, the Advent of Christ, is first of all about identity: the identity of the Son of God — "Who do you say that I AM? — and our identity, which mysteriously is enveloped in this first question. You see, we cannot know who we are until we have answered that question. We are on a journey to find ourselves in that sense. But it turns out mostly to be a process of subtraction, to clear our souls of debris, and to see ourselves in the pure reflection of Jesus' face.

Today, let us pray for those who are being tested, whose spiritual temperature is being taken. Let us pray for their spiritual concentration, which will mostly have to do with their love of God, burning off their impurities, and rendering their souls tender and exquisitely sensitive to the stench of sin. Let us pray, then, for this love, our hearts joined to theirs. And let us always remember on this day that their journey is also ours.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.