Commemoration of All Souls – 2 November 2025
One of the most precious things we have when someone we know and love dies is a photograph of them. Photographs bring back memories of time spent together, of stages in a person’s life, of the events that characterised their life. But a photograph not only keeps alive the memory of the person it depicts. Most importantly, a photograph evokes a whole relationship. The photograph becomes a powerful symbol of the bonds we had with this person and becomes the means by which we continue to savour the history of our relationship with them, its seasons, it joys, its regrets – and most importantly, its continued hopes. Yes, even in the absence of someone we love, we can continue to have hopes about our relationship with them, and through those hopes our relationships continue to grow. We see them in new ways; we remember past events and understand them more fully; we celebrate the many ways in which they gifted our own lives. We identify a quality in them which continues to touch us, and inform us, and calls us to us. Their qualities continue to invite us, to challenge us, to delight us, to shape us.
In regards to those hopes that we continue to nurture about those we have loved and who have died, for a long time I have loved a particular passage from a famous writer of the 20th century, Teilhard de Chardin. Perhaps it is a passage that we can hold in our hearts as we stand before the image of the ones we have loved and who have died. It speaks of the recognition that even though so much might have remained incomplete in the relationships we have treasured, nonetheless in Christ we remain present to one another, and indeed curiously are able to be more present to one another than we could even when we were physically present to each other.
“Christ consumes with his glance my entire being. And with that same glance, that same presence, he enters into those who are around me and whom I love. Thanks be to him therefore I am united with them as in a divine milieu, through their inmost selves, and I can act upon them with all the resources of my being. Christ binds us and reveals us to one another. What my lips fail to convey to my brother and sister he will tell them better than I. What my heart desires for them with anxious, helpless ardour he will grant them if it be good. What others cannot hear because of the feebleness of my voice, what they shut their ears against so as not to hear it, this I can confide to Christ who will one day tell it again to their hearts. And if all this is so, then, I can indeed die with my ideals, I can be buried with the vision I wanted to share with others. Christ gathers up for the life of tomorrow our stifled ambitions, our inadequate understandings, our completed or clumsy but sincere endeavours. Nunc dimittiis, Domine, servum tuum in pace. Now Lord you can let your servant go in peace.[“1]
In and through and with Jesus, we know life is stronger than death. The victory of Jesus over death is the victory of love over fear, the victory of memory over forgetfulness, the victory of presence over absence. It is the victory which underscores our confidence that the relationship with the ones we love never dies. Though our loved ones are no longer with us, in the Risen Christ, our relationship with them continues: our relationship has every possibility of growth.
That is why our pictures of those we love are so important for us. It is why we put the pictures in prominent places. In our memory, entrusted to the Risen Christ and perfected in him, the life of our loved ones continues to breathe deep within us.
[1] Tielhard de Chardin, “The Mystical Milieu” in Writings in Time of War.
