Friday 2nd NovCommem0ration of All Souls

Fr Julian Browning

Wisdom 3 : 1 – 9 ;  Romans 5 : 5 - 11  ;  John 6 : 37 – 40 

Requiem means rest. Requiem is what we ask for those whom we knew, who have died. It is the rest at the end of all things, the passing from death to life, the resurrection at the last day, which is their destiny and ours. We're in it together. I've never found it easy to pray for the dead. They seem fine. They are at rest, the restlessness of life is over for them. Human sensation ceases at death, human identity no longer has purpose. We're the ones who keep needing the prayers. But if we run out of steam, the words and music of Faure's Requiem can do the praying for us tonight. The dead need our prayers because they, like us, have not yet completed their journey. We are not praying to them, we are praying to God for them. And our prayers bring us and them into a new realm of experience, where the divisions are healed between those who are alive and those who are dead, and where there is a glimpse of the perpetual light, the judgment which awaits them and us.

...we think of them as they were when they were alive, and that is entirely right, that is where our imagination takes us, because they were and are part of our life.

What holds us back all the time is our fear of death. Hardly surprising, really. Popular culture doesn't help. Halloween makes monsters of us all. And so from Halloween to horror films and table turning, from séance to stage hypnotism, reincarnation and spiritualism, the culture of death becomes less harmless, as we project our fears of death on the dead themselves, and the horror of it all keeps everyone afraid. That is eternal restlessness, not requiem. That is magic, not religion. This fear of death leads to those strange modern funerals at which death is never mentioned, and where instead, in the vacuum, there is a feverish building up of the individual personality, a drama of the self. The great virtue of the old Anglican funeral service was that it was the same for everybody. This is realistic. We are all in the end very similar, given to human failings, limited by our natures, ambiguous in our motives. When we understand what our life means, we can begin to understand what death is. Christians believe that life is a gift to us from God. It is not only this life we are offered, but eternal life. And we leave this earth with a  value or meaning, which is known only to God, whatever fine words are said at our funeral.

God  has given us life, and he has also given us the lives of those whom we pray for today, those whom we knew in their lives, and whom we still know in our lives. There are parents, friends, colleagues, whom we might think about every day, and we dont turn them into ghosts or pumpkin heads, we think of them as they were when they were alive, and that is entirely right, that is where our imagination takes us, because they were and are part of our life. Commemoration of the departed, either by lighting a candle, or saying a name in your heart, or just seeing them in our minds eye as Faure's requiem and the liturgy does the work, all this is important because we are saying that the link is not broken, indeed the love between those who have died and those who are alive is confirmed. We pray for them because they are our friends,and we shall always be there for them.They matter to us and to God. We can not abandon them to an eternal nowhere, a silence in which they are forgotten, just because the subject of death frightens us. We pray for them because we know, as our medieval forbears knew only too well, that when we die there will be unfinished business, because we have not done the things we ought to have done, and we have done the things we ought not have done. There is a medieval brass monument, engraved like this: Though we be gone, & past out of mynde, / As you wold be prayed for, pray for us. Only the living can do that.

Early next year we are having a series of evening lectures on Dante in this church. Dante's great work, the Divine Comedy, describes a journey through hell and heaven, which is a mirror held up to our lives on earth. The dead are real people, with names and features. He called his work Commedia, a Comedy, not a tragedy, because a comedy is written in a common language which is easily understood, and a comedy has a happy ending. Tonight's requiem has a happy ending. Faure's music, like Dante's Commedia, takes us 'in paradisum': may the angels lead you into paradise, ...and may they guide you into the holy city, Jerusalem ...may you have eternal rest. Like Dante, we look beyond a hell peopled by our sadistic imaginations, we look beyond a boot camp purgatory, we look beyond the picture book heaven, which always manages to look rather dull. We look for nothing less than the Resurrection of the body and life everlasting. This is not a place; this is a hope, a hope by which we can live and die. A hope that God's purposes will be fulfilled, and that our souls and bodies, and those of whom we have known and loved, will be seen to have played a glorious part in that triumph of life over death. Jesus rose from the dead, the first fruits of that harvest. In the end this is a belief in the triumph of love. What we are trying to show tonight, as best we can, is a love which accepts death, a love without fear, the love which enfolds both us and those who have died. Prayer is a way of embracing others. As Jesus taught us in the way that He died, it is through the love which accepts death that we come to eternal life.