All Souls

It is this sense of something ‘other’ that must lead us on to the thought of the barrier that has to be crossed before ‘this mortal life has put on immortality’. Death may be a beginning, but we feel that it is also an end. And this we feel in a thousand ways: a loved voice has forever been silenced, vivid experiences leave behind them but wraiths in the form of imperfectly evoked memories, and hopeful strivings and ecstatic fulfilments are so quickly lost. We seem to be elsewhere before we are here, to be otherwise before we are thus, forever to be losing today to yesterday. Death is in us, about us and around us. We live in a world of dead leaves, of the flotsam of long-ebbed tides, of fading footprints upon roads where we may no longer pass and of echoes dying on a wind that scatters ashes.

Any consideration of death, therefore, must involve a consideration of these two great cross-currents of human experience: on the one hand, that all is passing and we with it; on the other, that we are part of a dynamic and creative force which is independent of and triumphs over destruction and decay. These cross-currents appear to be so opposed, so much in conflict with each other, that hope and despair, creation and destruction, seem irreconcilable forces which impel us in this way or in that in frustrating alternation. We cannot relinquish our hold upon creative hope, for, however much we may proclaim our cynical realism, we are unable totally to abandon it; yet, at the same time, we cannot but be piercingly aware of death and decay, however much we proclaim our confidence in the value of our plans for ourselves or for the human race. A facile optimism cannot do more than temporarily conceal the one from us, while abandonment to despair can never fully destroy the possibility of the other.

‘In the midst of life’, then, ‘we are in death.’ If there is one certain event in human life, death is it. We know that we shall die. We may attempt to forget it, we may even deliberately ignore it, we may revolt violently against it, but death is inescapable. As we have said, death is the great sign of contradiction. It signifies inevitable, daunting and certain destruction or ultimate triumph and lasting glory. That life is no mere existential phenomenon, episode no mere empty transience, love no mere passing affinity, that there exists, beyond and through all the changes and vicissitudes of living, an eternal life beating at the heart of things, and that death is but the rending of the veil that hides immortality from human eyes – such is the certainty of Christian faith, the assurance of Christian hope and the very substance of Christian love. That love is stronger than death, that hope transcends separation and that faith is the key to fact are of the very essence and meaning of Christianity. The gift of God to man is the present and permanent possession of that for which he yearns. As St. Paul tells us: ‘faith is the substance of those things for which we hope.’

Let us, then, face boldly and courageously the certain fact of death, let us see what is the worst that death can do to us and to others and then let us see that, for the Christian, death is not an end, but a beginning. Let us examine how and in what way we can prepare ourselves to pass through that gateway into the unknown. Let us see that the resurrection for which we long is already as much a part of our lives as the death which leads to it.