REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 2021 STM TORONTO
Joseph Tomelty, the late Irish playwright in his play All Soul’s Night, tells a haunting story. Set in 1949, in the fictitious village of Assagh on the shores of a County Down lough, it tells the story of a family trying to get by, in the midst of strife and tragedy. On All Soul’s night they become aware of the souls of their relatives asking for prayers.
The soul of a young fisherman killed tragically at sea chastises his family for neglecting to pray for him while he was at sea and even since he has died. A quote from the play is found on the playwright’s tomb stone: “Pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins; pray for the living that they may be loosed from their greed.” What Tomalty refers to is that sense that artists and poets have expressed down the generations at this time of year, that somehow the veil is thinner.
This time of year with All Saints, All Souls and Remembrance Day reminds us of our own mortality and that we need to pray for the Dead as well as the Living. Fr. Faber, a 19th C. Oratorian refers to a brother: “One half from earth, one half from heaven, Was that mysterious blessing given; Just as his life had been One half in heaven, one half on earth, Of earthly toil and heavenly mirth, A wondrous woven scene!”
This needs to be the case that for each of us, for every Catholic Christian, that our life must be marked by the character of heaven, must be shaped by the priorities of the greater city, the heavenly Jerusalem.
At the heart of all is an overriding theme: the spiritual closeness to the departed, of the economy of prayer for all the children of God. In mutual prayer we trade freely in the benefits of that place where we hope to spend eternity – Jerusalem the Golden. In charity we pray for those who have died, and for those still alive that we may enjoy the vision of God together on that other shore. And today we remember and pray for all those who gave their lives for God and the freedom of others.
The veil is always very thin, and our loved ones who have gone before us to that other shore are still very close to us. We pray for the dead that they might be loosed from the effects of sin, and we must pray for one another that we might lose those sometimes-greedy attachments to the things that cannot bring us to that City of Light. With God’s help, may our lives continue to be a “wondrous woven scene”, shot through with prayer for the “quick and the dead” in the gilded light of Jerusalem the Golden with the threads which will, at the last, lead us home.
