All Souls
We live in times that find it harder and harder to forgive. It is not that people are becoming crueller; but they’ve largely lost the conceptual categories, the identity-shaping stories, that make forgiveness possible. It isn’t natural to pardon. Our nature craves vengeance and tends to crave it immoderately. To be a Christian is to place forgiveness at the centre of one’s life: to ask for it humbly; to give it generously, letting go of grudges. When we come up against the boundaries of our sensibility, we look towards the cross and remember: we are not our own. All Souls’ Day affirms the reality of a pardon that extends, in Christ, beyond death. It summons us to become, by prayer and sacrifice, agents of divine mercy. Our prayer for the dead manifests the Christian revolution. It’s charter is founded on faith in the soul’s immortality, in our answerability for our choices, in the efficacy of intercession, in the reality of a Love stronger than death. Long live that peaceful revolution.
