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“What were the names of our friends again?” I asked the wife. “Those who also died when President Ramon Magsaysay’s plane crashed in Cebu…”
I was listing departed kith and kin. Their names would be included in the traditional All Souls’ Day Mass. Name recall, however, dims in people like us. We’re a group that columnist William Safire once joshed as the “almost-old.”
At Mythers’ Thursday lunch for editors, Cris Icban of Manila Bulletin and I scribbled on paper napkins names of colleagues who’d passed on. The length of the list rocked us. How can so many names pile up in just half-a-century of journalism?
There are no erasures in this kind of list. “No traveler returns… from this undiscovered country,” Hamlet mutters.
Some left abruptly. “We’re in the twilight zone of our lives,” I said to no one in particular at a Hong Kong meeting of Press Foundation of Asia officers. “Don’t say that,” ABS-CBN’s Eugenio Lopez Jr. gently remonstrated, “we’ve plenty of time.” Before the year ended, Geny had gone.
Life beyond a handful of ashes is the capstone of All Souls’ Day. “Death is not the extinguishing of life,” Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote. “It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.”
This feast stresses reaching beyond the grave. “It is a good and wholesome thought to pray for the dead,” the ancient Book of Maccabees teaches. “I know that my Redeemer lives,” Job wrote. “And in the end… yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
In the year 998, the Benedictine abbot Odilo of Cluny picked November 2 for this remembrance. This practice spread to other countries, including the Philippines.
“We give them back to you O Lord, who first gave them to us,” an ancient prayer says. “Yet, as you do not lose in giving, so we have not lost them by their return…. Death is only a horizon. And a horizon is the limit of our sight.
“We thank you for the deep sense of mystery that lies beyond our mortal dust…. Lift us up, that we may see further, as one by one, you gather scattered families, from the strife and weariness of time, to the peace of eternity.”
Those who have departed are “linked to us in such a way we can continue to talk with them,” the Oblate professor Ron Rolheiser explains. “Our relationship with them can continue to grow: Reconciliation that wasn’t possible before their deaths can now occur.”
We call that “the communion of saints,” Father Rolheiser writes. Enshrined in the Creed, it asks us to believe: we’re still in real community of life and communication with those who have died.
“Often in a family, a friendship or community, we experience tension, anger, differences, hurts that can’t be undone. And then everything changes because someone dies. Death brings a peace, a clarity, and a charity not possible before. Why?
“It’s not simply because death took someone out of family, office, or circle of friends, or even, as source of tension. It happens because, as Luke’s account teaches, death washes things clean.”
“Today you will be with me in paradise!” Jesus spoke these words to the good thief on the cross. They’re meant for every one of us who dies without having had time and opportunity to make all the amends and speak all the apologies we owe.
“There is still time after death, on both sides, for reconciliation and healing to happen. Because inside the communion of saints we have privileged access to each other. And there we can finally speak all of those words that we couldn’t speak before. We can reach across death’s divide.
“It is a gift to die a happy death, reconciled in love, with no unfinished business. But, happily, there’s still time after death for this to happen for those of us who aren’t so lucky and who end up dying with some bitterness, anger, wound, and frustration still gnawing away.”
All Souls’ Day reveals that young and old ache for assurance of what lies beyond the grave. “If only I could see him, for just a second, and know he’s all right, I’d be able to cope,” Seamus tells the priest blessing his son’s crumpled body, killed in an accident.
“I remembered Seamus’ comment at a Mass for a student accident victim,” writes Jesuit theologian Catalino Arevalo. “The boy’s classmates chose the Transfiguration for gospel reading. ‘The one about Jesus going up the mountain and clothes changing into dazzling white,’ they said.”
“It struck me, for the first time, that Jesus allowed his friends to see, ‘for just a second,’ what was beyond. Their reaction was strange: They did not want to leave the spot. ‘It is wonderful for us to be here.’ But Jesus insisted they go down the mountain.”
“What if… for only just a second we could see people who’ve gone before us, in faith, especially those suddenly or tragically taken, to that place of light that is God’s promise? What if we, too, had some authentic extended experience of what ‘our eyes have not seen, nor our ears heard’ of what God prepared for those who are faithful?”
“It is truly the better thing that an authentic extended experience is not given us – because we would not want to leave the spot. Better because there’s still so much of the humdrum, the frustrating, for us to endure, and if possible, with courage, to build some small beginnings of the Kingdom…”
Does it matter that no erasures are permitted in this kind of list? Vita mutatur, non tollitur, says the preface in all requiem masses, not just… on All Souls’ Day. “Life is changed, not taken away.”
