All Souls' Day

Nothing is Wasted. On All Souls' Day our family would brave the horrendous traffic to La Loma cemetery to pray for Lola Leonarda and light candles around her tombstone. My siblings and I would gather the candle drippings and mold them into balls of wax. And when we got impatient over the slow dripping of wax of lola’s candles, we would collect the wax drippings from the candles of nearby graves.

Our childhood game of gathering candle drippings and molding them into balls of wax is an apt metaphor for the mystery underlying the feast we celebrate today. Just as the candle drippings are refashioned so that nothing is wasted, so too will our bodies, having infinite value, be transformed, glorified and reunited with our souls on the Last Day.

Life will Prevail. Secular, pop culture maintains a deep conviction in the triumph of good over evil, love over hatred, life over death. We see this primordial conviction in the battles of numerous superheroes, recently, such as Batman, the Dark Knight, and Iron Man; in the sagas of Harry Potter and the hobbits of Lord of the Rings; in telenovelas, such as Dyesebel and Iisa pa Lamang, that glue us to the television set all evening.

But what justifies and certifies this conviction that goodness and life will indeed prevail in the end? Schillebeeckx asserts that nothing in secular culture warrants such a belief. Cosmology points to stars that are born and die, to supernovas that explode, to a universe, long thought to be eternal, having been born 15 billion years ago in a Big Bang and perhaps collapsing into itself billions of years henceforth. Biology knows all too well that all organic material will die and decay. Biological beings end off as the dust of the earth and the sea. Human history reveals to us that human civilizations rise and collapse. No civilization, no matter how powerful, is invincible and impervious to change and eventual ruin. Nothing in secular culture, the natural and social sciences point to eternal existence as our ultimate end. Instead, everything points to decay and annihilation as our final fate.

The only source of confidence of a belief that life and goodness will prevail over death and evil is the Christian faith in the resurrection: “The Lord is Risen.” The Eternal One has become human and embraced human death. In His bodily resurrection Christ has brought with him our bodily, material and historical existence into the realm of eternity. In Jesus’ resurrection, the human has entered the divine realm, the historical the eternal, the mortal the immortal. We, who are contingent and finite by nature, have been suffused by the grace of the Risen Lord with the gift of everlasting life.

The Person is Eternal. What do Christians hope for? Not only immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of our bodies. Many of us conflate these two beliefs, which are related but nonetheless distinct. Immortality refers to the constitutive element of the human person that survives death, which vanquishes the body. The paradox is that while the person dies at death, something in us, the deepest part of our personhood, survives death. The popular term for that element in us that survives death is the soul.

But the survival of the soul beyond death is not as yet the resurrection. The radicality of the Christian belief in the resurrection consists in this: on the Last Day, we believe that God wll judge both the living and the dead, and that all the righteous who have passed away will be reunited with their bodies. We will not be disembodied spirits for all eternity. Easter promises that we will become glorified bodies (transformed body and soul reunited) in eternal communion with God, one another, and all of creation. Can there be a more preposterous religious hope for all?

This Christian vision of the End Time is indeed seemingly farfetched. It seems too incredible to believe. Too incredibly wonderful in which to place our hopes. And yet assured because of the resurrection of Jesus, the icon of what we most deeply hope for: the triumph of good over evil, the reversal of all the ills of human history, the vindication of love, the eternal significance of all the good we have done; the resurrection of Jesus, the icon of the ultimate future of our personhood and our bodies: life beyond death, without discarding our human bodies and our material surroundings, but instead, glorified bodies in a world, the entire cosmos, recapitulated by divine mercy.

Christian Hope is Certain. Today, I will bless the remains of my father, relatives and friends who have passed away. I am too old for gathering candle drippings and forming wax balls, but as I watch children do so, I will be reminded of the certain hope of Christians. One day, I will be reunited with all my loved ones and all humanity not only as immortal souls, but as glorified bodies. Like the candle drippings that are not discarded but transformed, so will our bodies be transformed and be reunited with our immortal souls, and in the process be reunited with all creation and the Creator, the Lord Giver of Life, the Lord Conqueror of Death.

Fr. Manoling Francisco is a prolific composer of liturgical music and serves on the faculty of the Loyola School of Theology. For feedback on this column, email [email protected].