The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls)
I love a lot of things about being Catholic, but I especially love the sincerity and complexity with which we Catholics approach death. Death is no easy subject to talk about! It’s scary, painful, and it provides unmeasurable amounts of uncertainty all at once. This all can make death a fairly dread-filled topic for dinner conversation. So what do we do, as Catholics? We talk about it all the time! We confront our death every time we pray a Hail Mary or go to Mass. We celebrate Ash Wednesday, where we’re specifically reminded that we “are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We even developed an entire art style around skulls, specifically designed to remind us of the fact that one day, we all will die!
Why do we do this? To constantly remind ourselves that, as they say, “you can’t take it with you when you go.” Or as my mother likes to put it, “there’s no such thing as a hearse with a luggage rack.”
We regularly remind ourselves of our death because it helps us put our lives into perspective. For many of us, through most of our lives, I don’t think we consider the reality of the fact that we will die. Of all of the things that can befall us during our lives, this is the one that we will always have the least experience with, as we can only experience it once. Without healthy perspective and constant reminders, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the finite aspects of day-to-day life. And who could blame us? It’s all we’ve ever experienced.
Ultimately, however, this life is finite. Every one of us will die. But as Catholics, we also know that death doesn’t get the final word. Yes, we will die in this world, but in doing so, we will pass on to the next – on to something much greater than what we have here. Beyond this finite world is God in Heaven, whose infinity makes our finite existence on Earth feel inconsequential. In the end, this gives us a choice. It is up to us to decide where our focus will lie. We can focus on this finite life, our day-to-day relationship with things that all will some time pass away; or we can fix our eyes on the infinite, which dwarfs our finite existence and can help us to see how feeble and passing this world is. Remembering that we will die (or in Latin, “memento mori”) helps us to remember the end result that all of our human lives will face, and hopefully in the process, it helps us not to despair, but to place our hope and our gaze on what we know comes after.
- Marty Bagatti