Commemoration of All Souls (2025) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

Back in 2013, scientists came across some bones in a cave. These bones belonged to an unknown human species, some 300,000 years old, which they named Homo Naledi, with a brain about a third the size of modern Homo Sapiens. Surprisingly, these bones seemed to be organised in such a way as to suggest they had been deliberately interred. There’s been much debate about whether other Homo Naledi buried them, or some natural process brought the bones there, or contemporary or later Homo Sapiens brought them there. But everyone agreed that care of the dead was a defining human characteristic: some animals, like elephants and crows, recognise death, and even engage in mourning rituals for a little time, but only human beings care for the remains of the dead. 

The dead remain part of our lives and our communities. We tell stories about them. We define ourselves by them. We see ourselves as continuing, or destroying, or correcting their work. This is not just people we’ve personally known, but those who died a long time before we were born, about whom we know very little, people whose actions we might approve, or disapprove, or simply not understand, who might not have looked, or thought like us, or even have spoken the same language, enemies as well as friends. There is something very human and universally human in thinking of the dead, not as those who’ve gone away, but as hanging around. 

We don’t merely mourn the dead; we hope for them to be restored to us. In Christ, that hope is answered. It was not merely answered here and there, as in today’s Gospel, where Jesus raised the son of the widow of Naim from the dead. It is answered for all of us to the extent that we are united to Christ. Because Christ is life, and if we are united to him as members of the Body of Christ, we share his life. And that life cannot be extinguished. As Jesus himself said “he who lives and believes in me will never die.” If that life cannot be extinguished, then to the extent that we are united to Christ, we are united to his whole body, including the dead.

The two successive celebrations at the beginning of November, All Saints and All Souls, remind us of this basic fact and its importance. All Saints reminds us that the dead who are completely united to Christ and share fully in his own heavenly life remain in our lives through their prayers. We benefit from their closeness to God. They pray for us and draw us closer to God so that we may one day join them. But we also know that for most of us, our union with Christ is imperfect, as is our union with each other. At the end of life, we die with many regrets about how well we have loved God and how well we have loved our neighbours. When someone we have known dies, we often regret all the ways in which the circumstances or our own or their choices distanced us from them, the ways in which we were insufficiently attentive or grateful to them. All Souls tells us that it is not too late to draw closer to them in love. 

So too with the distance that exists between them and God: Just as we are aided by the prayers of the saints to draw closer to God, so too we can help those we love, and whose union with Christ was imperfect, draw closer to God, by our own prayers and good deeds on

their behalf. This is not just a nice thing to do for those we loved and who loved us, but a duty incumbent on us in relation to everyone united to Christ. Just as we can reach out to those we have loved and who loved us in Christ, so too, we can repair the breach with many of those whom we have hurt or who have hurt us. As we hope to receive God’s mercy for ourselves, we can extend that mercy to those who have gone before us and pray, and offer up our sacrifices and good deeds. 

We are united in Christ to billions of people whom we have never known, people who contributed to the world we live in but are forgotten or unknown, people who left behind no one to remember or mourn them, people who died in wars and massacres and genocides, people who died by suicide, people who died on the streets. The Church, the body of Christ, considers the dead so important that at every Mass, she remembers the dead. And to underline this point, she gives us the whole month of November to think of the dead, to visit graveyards, and to pray especially for the dead. Let us take the time then, as often as we can, and especially throughout November, the month of the dead, to recall and offer up our prayers and good deeds for our deceased brothers and sisters, in all their variety, so that one day we might come to be united with them fully as saints in heaven.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP is undertaking postgraduate studies in Sacred Scripture and currently living in Adelaide, South Australia.