Your word is a lamp for my feet and light for my path

I always find November a somewhat sombre and difficult month. The golden colours of autumn are quickly giving way to the barrenness of winter. As the month progresses, the days will get gradually shorter and darkness will increasingly make its presence felt. We lose the colours of nature and the life-giving quality of light. It is a month I associate with loss. It is perhaps fitting, then, that November is the month when we reflect upon more personal experiences of loss, the loss of significant people in our lives, people who have journeyed with us, who gave us love and whom we loved in return. The commemoration of All Souls is a day when we do that in a special way.

Although nothing is more painful than the loss of a loved one in death, our faith gives us this hope-filled vision in the face of death. St Paul says that ‘hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us’. Our hope is grounded in God’s love for us now, a very personal love that is poured into the hearts of each one of us through the Holy Spirit. God’s love, revealed in Jesus and poured into our hearts through the Spirit, continues to hold on to us when we pass through the door of death. As all authentic human love is always life-giving for the one loved, God’s love is supremely life-giving for us, even in the face of our bodily death. What God’s love has already done for us through his Son and the Spirit in this life is the assurance of what God’s love will do for us in eternity. As Paul says in the second reading, ‘Now that we have been reconciled [to God], surely we may count on being saved by the life of his Son’.

It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.

~2 Maccabees 12:4 ~

Martin Hogan