Vigils Reading – All Souls

ALL SOULS’ DAY

From a homily by Fr. Karl Rahner5

◊◊◊

All Souls’ Day is the day of everyone who has died and gone home into the eternal love of God. Today, then, we want to remember before God our dead, all those who once belonged to us and who have departed from us. In true love no one can replace the beloved, for true love loves the beloved in those depths where each is uniquely and irreplaceably oneself. That is why each one of those who has passed away has taken a part of our heart away: they may be said even to have taken the heart with them, if death has trodden through our lives from beginning to end.

If one has really loved, and continues to love, then even before one’s own death our life is changed into a life with the dead. Could the lover forget his dead? If one has really loved, then one’s forgetting and the fact that one has ceased weeping are not signs that nothing has really changed, that one is just the same as before. They are, rather, signs that a part of one’s own heart has really died with the loved ones, and is now living with the dead. That is why one can no longer mourn. We live, then, with the dead, with those who have gone before us into the dark night of death…

Today, when we stand by the graves, or when our heart must seek distant graves, where perhaps not even a cross stands over them any longer; when we pray, “Lord, grant them eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon them;” when we quietly look up towards the eternal homeland of all the saints and – from afar and yet so near – greet God’s light and God’s love, our eternal homeland; then all our memories and all our prayers are only the echo of the words of love that the holy living, in the silence of their eternity, softly and gently speak into our heart. Hidden in the peace of the eternal God, filled with God’s own bliss, redeemed for eternity, permeated with love for us that can never cease, then, on their feast, utter the prayer of their love for us: “Lord, grant eternal rest to them whom we love – as never before – in your love. Grant it to them who still walk the hard road of pilgrimage, which is nonetheless the road that leads to us and to your eternal light. We, although silent, are now closer to them than ever before, closer than when we were sojourning and struggling along with them on earth. Grant to them, too, Lord, eternal rest, and may your perpetual light shine on them as on us. May it shine upon them now as the light of faith, and then in eternity, as the light of blessed life.”… And there will be one, single, eternal feast of all the saints