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From the McGrath Institute for Church Life and OSV Podcasts, this is Church Life Today. I'm Leonard DiLorenzo. Today, the day this episode is released, is the commemoration of all souls. I have long been fascinated by the mystery we observe today, which I understand to be a mystery of longing in Christ. It is a longing of the living for their beloved dead, and if we can say such things, the longing of the dead to be living. It is a day clouded by unknowing, but pierced by hope. It so happens that my first and constant academic interest is in precisely what we as a church uplift in our liturgy today: the question and promise of communion between the living and the dead. More than an academic matter, though, this is a question and promise that touches each of us at some point, whether we confront it or not. It is the question and promise of finding reunion or ongoing union across the chasm of death. I could not let this day pass without observing it, since it happens to fall on one of our regularly scheduled podcast release days. So here's what I want to do. I wrote a book several years ago called Our Faithful Departed: Where They Are and Why It Matters. I'm going to share the opening chapter of that book with you here. Actually, several years ago, I shared a different portion of the book, and I'll link that below. I hope that this will be of some interest or perhaps even inspiration or curiosity to you as you listen and after you listen, whether today on the Feast of All Souls or sometime hereafter. Anyways, here it goes. Between the living and the dead. I had just seen my grandfather a few weeks before his death. He was in the hospital, and in accordance with the directives of his living will, the feeding tubes had been removed. He was unable to speak and mostly unable to move, but it was clear he knew it when my brother and I walked in the room. I was the last one to leave his hospital room that night, staying behind to say goodbye and to whisper a prayer over him, tracing the sign of the cross on his forehead. It was the first time I had ever prayed with Luis DiLorenzo. I had looked upon death with my grandfather once before five years earlier. On a characteristically warm and wet Florida afternoon, I stood with my arm around my uncharacteristically vulnerable grandfather. The proudest and most stubborn man I have ever known was crying like a child in the rain. The woman who had been his wife for more than 50 years was lying in a cardboard coffin in the building behind us, awaiting cremation, and he had just kissed her forehead for the last time. Even at the end of a long and loving life, he felt her loss as an unmitigated tragedy. Dorothy DiLorenzo was gone. The tradition of Memento Mori tells each of us to remember you must die. But that day in the rain, my grandfather confronted something else. It was not his own death that shocked and terrified him, it was his wife's. And five years later, in that hospital room, as I traced the sign of the cross on my grandfather's forehead, I was confronting his death, not yet my own. The death of loved ones is a real end. As a Christian, though, I am to believe that life is changed, not ended. My grandmother believed that. I am not sure my grandfather did, but I hope the same thing for both of them. That they live. But how do they live? Where did they go? And what does this mean for us who remain? Wherever the dead go, the overwhelming sense is that they are out of our reach. Since the mid-1950s, Gallup has been asking Americans about their belief in communicating with the dead. The question appears in different ways, yet no matter how it has been asked, only once in 1998 did the number of people who answered affirmatively about being in relationship with the dead rise above 30%. Year after year, for most people, the dead are silent and removed from the world of the living. The default assumption is that the dead are somewhere, but in no real way are they here or reachable from here. They have disappeared. When my grandfather was crying in the rain, it was the absence of his wife that he felt. Her body was there, but she was not. As far as I know, he never cried again in public, though my father would sometimes hear him sobbing alone in his room late at night. My grandfather longed for his wife's life, no longer present to him in her body. When my grandfather died, life left his body too. At his funeral, the well-intentioned minister assured us that Lou was now happily reunited with Dorothy and enjoying endless rounds of golf. His lifeless body was in the room. Her lifeless body was in ashes, but those of us who remained were prompted to take consolation in a fuzzy image of them together. That well-intentioned minister echoed the default assumptions of American religiosity. There is an afterlife. I realize now that in the more than 1,600 days between my grandmother's death and his own, my grandfather grasped something that the well-intentioned minister did not. It is the life in the bodies of our beloved dead that we miss. Dorothy's absence changed Lou's life, just as her presence did. That is why I think the truly urgent question that no survey will ever be able to grasp is this. Do we live as though those who have died are in communion with us now? That is a question about grief and mourning, hope and longing, memory and communication. It is also a question that Christians must address if we are to live what we say we believe. What Christians profess is not always the same as what we believe. Of course, we profess the belief of the church, but we only really believe in what we allow to take flesh in us. I can profess to believe in respecting my elders and treating everyone fairly, but I do not really believe in that if I habitually disparage the elderly and treat those less educated or less financially stable as my inferiors. If I profess honesty but routinely cheat at poker, I do not really believe in honesty the way I say I do. For the record, I am not enough, I am not good enough at poker to cheat at poker. Or am I? Thus, we Christians must continually assess whether and to what degree we actually believe in what we profess. By professing the Apostles' Creed at baptism, the church hands on to us belief in the life that God nurtures in us throughout our Christian lives. In particular, the third part of the creed is ordered to belief in the Holy Spirit, which unfolds into five specific and interrelated articles of faith. These are the ways in which the divine life communicated to us beginning in baptism grows in us toward completion in heavenly bliss, where God is all in all. The life given in the Spirit brings about the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Belief in life everlasting is not merely belief in something that begins once our breathing on this earth ceases. It is also belief in the everlasting significance of the lives we live now. In other words, who and what we are now in this life has everlasting consequences. This explanation is likely to make us squeamish very quickly because it sounds a bit like judgment, as if we are held accountable for what we have done and what we have failed to do, for what we become and what we fail to become. But that is precisely what Christians profess to believe: that our lives matter because God makes them matter, and other people's lives matter because God makes them matter. Believing in life everlasting is not about valuing what comes after death at the expense of life in the world now. It is rather about valuing life in the world now, our own and others, because God cherishes all life now and evermore. This emphasis on judgment and the eternal consequences of the quality of the lives we lead now might stir up notions of God as some kind of wicked Santa Claus. He's keeping a list, checking it twice, and most of us should worry about being naughty because our end won't be nice. But the life of the Holy Spirit is not just about securing the significance and everlasting meaning of lives lived in God. It is about the Holy Spirit healing our lives of the sins, fractures, and sorrows that lead to ruin. We believe in the forgiveness of sins. And this is bomb to our troubled hearts, sinful creatures that we are. Does that belief shape the lives of Christians today? We might be inclined to answer affirmatively, since most people hope and trust that their own sins have been forgiven or will be forgiven at the end of time. After all, only 0.5% of Americans believe they are going to hell, against nearly two-thirds who believe they are going to heaven. But if we push beyond considering the forgiveness of sins as a gift for me and come to recognize it as also bound for others, we might think differently. Everyone wants to be forgiven, but does everyone want to forgive? Believing in the forgiveness of sins entails committing ourselves to the painful and arduous work of forgiving others even now, seeking forgiveness from others even now, and trusting that this life of forgiveness will be complete in the heavenly kingdom. Belief in the Holy Spirit is belief that the command and power the Lord gives his disciples to forgive one another and seek forgiveness is the rule of eternal life from now on. The really challenging thing is the second part of that astounding petition Christians pray in the Lord's Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. To remain in unforgiveness or to fail to forgive others means remaining in a condition of fractured communion. The life of the Holy Spirit is the communion of the Father and the Son. And the gift of this life for us draws us into that holy communion. The Holy Spirit makes us into one communion, the communion of saints. This is the true image of the Holy Catholic Church, the one communion of those who share heavenly glory with those who still suffer under sin but seek that glory, the one communion of the living and the dead, the one communion that will be perfected at the end of time. This is the one communion Christ secures in himself, which he extends to his disciples through the Holy Spirit and offers to others through his disciples. In the third part of the creed, Christians profess belief in the Holy Spirit, communicating to us divine life, which is a life of wholeness. The Holy Spirit makes us whole in Christ. The dimensions of that wholeness are the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. The Holy Spirit makes us members of Christ, joined to one another in him. We profess this, but do we live as if we are actually members of one another? And do we believe that we who live are still joined to those who have died? At the Second Vatican Council, the church's belief in the one communion between the living and the dead was loudly recounted and affirmed. In Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the church, the Council Fathers declared that, quote, this sacred council accepts loyally the venerable faith of our ancestors in the living communion which exists between us and our sisters and brothers who are in the glory of heaven, or who are yet being purified after their death. Unquote. When it came to the point of describing the one communion of the church among her members presently abiding in different stages of the pilgrimage toward wholeness in Christ, the Council Fathers went on to provide a comprehensive and compelling account. Here's what they wrote. But at the present time some of his disciples are pilgrims on earth, others have died and are being purified, while still others are in glory. All indeed who are of Christ and who have his spirit form one church and in Christ are joined together. So it is that the union of the wayfarers with the brothers and sisters who sleep in the peace of Christ is in no way interrupted. But on the contrary, according to the constant faith of the church, this union is reinforced by an exchange of spiritual goods. This passage provides doctrinal clarity on what the church professes about the breadth of communion. It is like a commentary on the third part of the Apostles' Creed. Yet the Council Fathers proclaim near the end of the passage that the union between the living and the dead is in no way interrupted. This small phrase would sting most of us Christians in the modern world, not to mention those who do not profess the Christian faith. It stings us as foreign, lacking in experiential support, and bordering on unbelievable. What is death, if not the interruption of the union between those who live and those who live no longer? The church professes belief that in Christ the living and the dead are united. But when it comes to the practice of the faith, the belief that becomes flesh and blood, the overwhelming sense is one of separation. My grandfather felt this acutely when his wife died. Then again, he was not a practicing Christian in any obvious sense. Does that mean that his sense of separation from his wife after her death, rather than union with her, was something that only non-Christians experience, including baptized Christians who are not practicing? Do active or practicing Christians experience more of a sense of union with their beloved dead than separation from them? Just as forgiveness of sins and life everlasting are easier to profess than to fully believe, so the communion of saints, as the one communion between the living and the dead, rests easier on our lips than in our hearts. Though few Christians seem to understand how the resurrection of the body is integral to the Christian faith. Most Christians agree with and basically understand the other articles of faith in the third part of the creed. While developing a better intellectual understanding of these aspects of the faith may be necessary and potentially healing in its own way. Developing better knowledge is not the same as allowing belief to sink into your flesh and blood, reshaping your life in terms of what you desire, what you hope for, and what you treat as fundamentally true. You could say these things are true and yet not live as if they were true. The challenge to belief in this one communion is not a mere lack of understanding, as if it only required knowing the right things in the right way. The more challenging part is inhabiting the practices that slowly inscribes on the lives of the faithful what the church proclaims from generation to generation. The words of Christian belief must become flesh. My hope is to help awaken the Christian imagination. We have to imagine communion. Yet imagining communion is not just thinking about it, it is also picturing it, practicing it, and sacrificing for it. That is how the words of faith take on flesh and blood. This is not just important for those who grieve their beloved dead, though it is important for them. It is also important for all the living, because none of us who live now will ever be fulfilled without sharing communion with all the dead in Christ. That communion is what we hope for as Christians, but it is also what we are commanded to practice. We do not truly live if we do not remember and love the dead. For some time after his death, I struggled to find a memory of him on which I could build my hope for his resurrection to eternal life in Christ. I could profess belief that I hoped for this end for him, but allowing that belief to live in me was a struggle. I did not have the same struggle when it came to remembering and hoping for my grandmother. Her faith had been apparent to me. Eventually, though, it was the faith of my grandmother that showed me how to hope for my grandfather. And it began with a particular memory. For reasons I do not understand, what I usually remember first about my grandmother. In a vivid snapshot memory, is her sitting at the kitchen table in the slowly intensifying light of the early morning. The house is silent. One elbow is resting on the table, one hand pinching the skin above her brow, the other telling the beads of a rosary dangling near her knees. Her eyes are closed tight, and she has the look of intense, almost painful concentration on her face while her lips mutter prayers into the stillness of dawn. I was only a child when I witnessed her thus at prayer, and I only saw her for a moment. She did not see me. But that memory is there for me all these decades later. I have no doubt she was praying for me, nor do I doubt that she was praying for her other grandchildren and her two children, and I am certain that she prayed morning after morning for her husband. My grandfather's love for her and her love for him is a bond through which the grace and charity of our Lord may work. No one is saved alone. I have seen this truth illuminated in art, but to see and believe it in life requires an act of imagination and trust. If you look to the lower left corner from the viewer's perspective of Michelangelo's last judgment, you will see those who are being gathered on Christ's right. The bones of the dead are coming up from their graves, and their bodies are regaining flesh in their ascent toward Christ. Look closer, and you will see that no one is rising alone. Those who are higher up are reaching down to pull up those still journeying to the fullness of life. Near the center of the work, but still in the lower half, just to the left of the angels blowing their trumpets, there is one very fit and bright figure pulling up two shadowy figures. The figure in the light and the two in the shadows are not clasping hands. Instead, each is holding on to something that looks like a rope. Look closer still, and you see that this rope is beaded like a rosary. My grandmother prayed her rosary every morning. She prayed for my grandfather in life. I believe that she prays for him in death. And I know that my call is to pray for him as she did, even as I pray for her and ask her to pray for me. I began responding to that call unawares when by instinct I trace the sign of the cross on my dying grandfather's forehead. The pressing question for me today is how to live as though he who is dead is in communion with me right now. That is a question not merely of doctrine, but of practice. The struggle of living in communion with the dead. Today's episode has been a reading from the opening chapter of my book, Our Faithful Departed, Where They Are and Why It Matters, available from Ave Maria Press. As always, thanks to all of you for joining us on Church Life today.

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