Today being All Souls Day, with us on the move, I realised I wouldn't have any opportunity to join with
others in worship, let alone say a Mass for the Departed in thankfulness
for those gone before us whose lives have shaped mine - family,
friends, mentors, colleagues, inspirational public figures etc. This is
something I learned long ago to see as a duty of faith.
There was a
time when this kind of ritual was widely interpreted as an effort to appease or
influence the opinion of the Almighty on behalf of the dead, to be traded and marketed as a religious commodity. Daft
heterodoxy. What sort of existence is a life without gratitude for its
own foundations?
Well,
if you can't attend, let alone say Mass on a day like this, you can still
remember with thanksgiving that circle of people whose lives helped to
make your own, as far back as you can honestly recall their names and
faces. That's what I did today in my morning prayer time. There are many more people there in our past whose contribution
to our lives, from ignorance or forgetting, we have yet to understand,
or may never know. They are there in background obscurity. Our specific prayers
may shed no light on them, but without them we would have been nothing.
God's grace at work, since the beginning of time, before history, throughout evolution. Well worth remembering.
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