20261102 The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls’ Day)

(Job 19:1, 23-27a; Romans 5:5-11; Matthew 5:1-12a): A Beautiful Journey Toward Arrival, and a Resting Place on the Way to Eternity My dear brothers and sisters, today, amid the deepening colors of autumn, we remember those who have fallen asleep in the Lord, and we entrust them to the Lord’s mercy. It is also a day on which we humbly look back over the journey of our own lives, and ask where we are heading and where our hope for the future lies. It is a solemn day, and a day filled with blessed grace. We pause to ask ourselves: What kind of time, meaning, relationships, surroundings, and world are we painting and coloring with our lives? And in the midst of it all, what is our very being reaching toward, and gazing upon? Even if we must pass through seasons of trial and through valleys of painful tears, we pray that in the end, after everything, we may stand rightly before God, and that we may be found still walking the path of longing for him. In the Book of Job, we hear a heartfelt cry of lament and faith: “But I know that my Vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust. Whatever be done with this skin of mine, yet from my flesh I shall see God.” (Job 19:25-26) It is a cry that rises spontaneously from the depths of the heart, from one who has come to know the One who watches over us, who waits for us, and who sends us letters of mercy and love, in all that we are and all that we go through. It is why we are able to accept, deep within our souls, that God brings about what is good beyond every possibility that human understanding and calculation could imagine, and that he gathers all things into harmony and brings them to fulfillment. Truly, he is the One in whom we may place eternal hope and trust without reserve. And he leads that hope by the hand toward the very best of outcomes, not merely completing it but letting it overflow. That is why the words of Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans linger with us: “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5) Love gives birth to trust, and trust that does not waver brings down every wall of circumstance, even loss, even separation, even death. Today, let us pray for the courage to accept that death, though it is an unavoidable end, is also a passage along the way to eternity. Let us pray to be lifted up, to find our footing, amid the sorrow of parting that can weigh on us even more than death itself: the ache of affection left unspoken, the grief of those who remain, the pain and the wounds. And let us ask for the wisdom to see true happiness and the Kingdom of God not as some vague “somewhere beyond,” but as a concrete ideal toward which we are called to journey. So may it be that today’s poverty and sorrow; the patience to endure with gentleness; the justice that hungers for what is right; a heart steeped in the mercy that quietly forgives; the pure passion that refuses to be swept along by the world; the mature peace that is not lost in any circumstance; and the steps we take with the courage to seek what is right, unafraid of persecution, may all become, one by one, grace upon grace, leading us steadily toward eternity. My dear brothers and sisters, may today be a blessed day on which we are not stalled, gazing at heaven only as a distant hope, but instead ask for the wisdom of love: to adorn our everyday lives beautifully with a heart that longs for eternity, and to tend faithfully, as children of God, the ordinary days given to us as blessings. Amen.