Remembering the Dead

Today is All Souls Day, but the entire month of November is dedicated to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. You can get indulgences for them for the entire month.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

It remains one of the enduring consolations of my life that, joined as I am to Christ’s Body, the Church, I may at any time interact with the dead, with those cherished and faithful souls who have gone home before me to God.

As Cardinal Richelieu lay dying, having successfully served as chief architect and advisor to the French monarchy, he was asked if he had forgiven his enemies, of which there were a great many scattered across France and the face of Europe. “There are none left,” he replied, suggesting that he’d either killed or simply outlasted them all.  

So much for the meteoric rise of a once obscure member of the lesser nobility, to such dizzying heights as Prince of the Roman Catholic Church and Minister of State to King Louis XIII. As for myself, neither in matters civil nor religious have I ever done anything remotely comparable to the achievements of the celebrated cardinal. I can’t even speak French. Not two sentences of a language so lovely, I am told, that he established a learned academy charged with ensuring its preservation.  

However, in one respect at least, I do believe I have a leg up on old Richelieu, an advantage which, by his own admission, he could never claim. And that is the fact that, so far as I know, I have no enemies. Certainly not among the dead, which means I needn’t forgive anyone on the other side for making me their enemy. 

Now it could well be that there are many among the living who view me with enough enmity to justify calling me their enemy. But even if it were true, I’m not sure I’d want to know their names. Doubtless my views are disliked, but mostly by people I’ve never met; happily, in the circles in which I move, people tend to approve of the things I write. Or so my editor assures me, which may be owing to his kindness, I don’t know.

Leaving all that aside, however, the one thing that I am sure of, and every week or so confirmation arrives in the form of an obituary notice, is that most of the people I know are dead. Quite dead, in fact. And many of these I not only remember but greatly miss, mourning their absence with genuine and tender regret. And, of course, I pray for them. 

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,” T.S. Eliot tells us in Four Quartets,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.                                                                                    

It remains one of the enduring consolations of my life that, joined as I am to Christ’s Body, the Church, I may at any time interact with the dead, with those cherished and faithful souls who have gone home before me to God. Whether they share fully in the life of Paradise as members of the Communion of Saints, or if they must languish for a time amid the refining fires of Purgatory, they are each bound together for that heavenly glory we all await. “For it was through this hope,” St. Paul assures us, “that we were saved” (Romans 8:24).   

Meanwhile, continues Eliot, 

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

About the dead, I will admit, they often seem to me far more real than the living. My students, for instance, whom I find quite challenging enough just trying to teach, do not evoke the same reality. I do not commune with them in the same way as I do with the dead. They are not so nearly vivid or present to me in memory or desire as the ones whom I no longer see walking about. I do not tell them this, of course, but it remains true. It is the company of the dead that I prefer, longing to see them again, to reconnect somehow with the ones I knew and especially loved before death carried them off to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” 
That’s Shakespeare, by the way, who has left us many lapidary lines about death, including a memorable speech or two from Hamlet, that lugubrious fellow who cannot seem to make up his mind about whether he wants to live or to die. Or, to address the prince’s immediate problem, whether he’s prepared to obey the ghost of his murdered father and take out the treacherous usurper who now sits on the throne. 

Chesterton well understood poor Hamlet’s problem, his crippling incapacity to say yes to anything, thus leaving a bloody mess at play’s end for others to clean up. Compared to the towering example of the saintly Aquinas, for example—who, “with a most solid and colossal conviction believed in Life”—the pathetic Dane can’t even move himself to affirm the basic goodness of being.  

If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, 
“To be or not to be—that is the question,” then the massive 
medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, 
“To be—that is the answer.”  

It is a telling distinction Chesterton has drawn, unmasking the myth about the Renaissance being a time when all the lights went back on and people began to luxuriate in a world set free from medieval gloom and superstition. “The truth,” he tells us, “is that it was a time when a few men, for the first time, began to disbelieve in Life…Never until modern thought began, did they (the medievals) really have to fight with men who desired to die.”

And so the garrulous and self-doubting Dane has nothing to commend. Unlike his life-affirming ancestors, for whom existence was never a doubt but a delight, he must repeatedly pull himself back from the brink, and but for the dread of finding something worse on the other side, barely succeeds in doing so. The certainty of divine judgment, in other words, has always taken a dim view of self-slaughter. “Thus conscience does make cowards (of us all),” he dolefully concludes, putting his “bare bodkin” away for perhaps another day.

One of the great writers of Catholic France was Francois Mauriac, who, approaching his own death, composed a simple and moving prayer, which I often recite (not in the original, alas, but in a pleasing translation) when thinking about those who have gone before me, those whom I hope to see again.  It seems particularly apt for November, the month when we are not only moved to remember the dead but solemnly enjoined to do so:

Grant, Lord, that I lose myself in the peace of thy presence, 
so that when my hour comes, I shall pass through a transition almost insensible,
from you to you, from you the living bread, the bread of mankind, 
to you, the love alive, already possessed by those of my own beloved 
who have gone before me into thy shelter.