by Fr. Brian Wirth,
Director of Rural Life
November is one of the greatest months of the year in the Good Life, and in the liturgical year. As the harvest continues to progress for farmers, reaping the precious fruits of the earth and preserving them for future ends, the same is true liturgically.
Every Nov. 1, we begin by joyously recalling the lives of all saints. On All Saints Day, we specifically call to mind the precious fruits of faith, hope, charity, and heroic virtue bountifully cultivated in their holy lives and reaped in death. This celebration is an important reminder that these saintly witnesses were ordinary individuals who lived extraordinary lives steeped in the fruit of Christ’s Paschal Mystery.
Properly, All Saints Day is a daily call to live heroic lives as Catholic witnesses. Mother Teresa rightly states: “Holiness is not a luxury for the few; it is a simple duty for you and for me.” In living out with Christ the universal call to holiness within our daily vocations, eternal life is attainable for every person in every age.
Correspondingly, on Nov. 2, the Church prayerfully commemorates All Souls to God, preserving in the Church’s universal prayer the goodness of the faithful departed in view of their future end. Thus, the first two days of November enable us to call to mind the four Last Things: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Final Judgement.
All Souls Day recalls our own mortality: “for you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). Like the fields that are full of dust during harvest and then become hard and barren in the winter before spring, similarly brothers and sisters, to be reminded of our own mortality regularly is a grace that hopefully instills in us a more virtuous/regular sacramental life, thus better preparing ourselves for death and the fruitful hope of the Resurrection.
The first week of November (1-8), the Church grants the opportunity of gaining a plenary indulgence each day for our deceased loved ones and the faithful departed souls in Purgatory when we visit a cemetery and pray for the happy repose of their souls (with the other prescribed conditions; partial indulgences obtained the rest of the year).
Arguably the most important and fruitful spiritual work of mercy is praying for the dead and their eternal end, who can no longer pray for themselves. The Church firmly teaches that our prayers most certainly help the dead in Purgatory, where any and all forms of distorted self-love and imperfections are transformed into love of God. (1 Jn. 4:8)
The Church has always believed in the need for purification. In 2 Maccabees, roughly 140 years before the birth of Christ, we read: “If they were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead… “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” (2 Mac 12:44-45).
The Catechism teaches further: “From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead.” (CCC 607).
Thus in a beautiful way, the grain that is diligently harvested by farmers, the “fruit of the earth and work of human hands” enables the Church to not only pray for the dead via spiritual works of mercy, but farmers enable us to do so in the best way possible: in the Eucharistic sacrifice, “the source and summit of the Catholic life.” (CCC 1324).
As I celebrated All Souls Masses, I was struck by the last verse of “Jerusalem, My Happy Home”: “O happy harbor of the saints! O sweet and pleasant soil! In thee no sorrow may be found, No grief, no care, no toil.”
This reminded me when I went to Holy Trinity Catholic Cemetery in Okarche, Okla., two summers ago. This was where Blessed Stanley Rother was buried before his body was moved to his National Shrine in Oklahoma City. As I prayed in the cemetery on a 104-degree summer day, I was humbled at all the common last names, rural farmers, and family/parish family members who collectively prayed for Stanley and his vocation. Certainly, that cemetery ground and surrounding farmland was indeed a most “sweet and pleasant soil.”
Seeing their prayers which helped Stanley reach the state of Blessed, now in view of all the faithful departed who await the glory of Heaven in Okarche and in every cemetery, it is our time to return the favor and pray for the happy repose of all souls.
As the French Catholic novelist Leon Bloy wrote: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”
In persevering faith and charitable works, may these words inspire us to pray for the faithful departed regularly so that we all may become the saints God has called us to be from the beginning, reaping the precious fruits of a life well lived for the sake of the glorious end.
