All Saints (after Edward Leen)
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that You are here, that You see me, that You hear me. I adore You with profound reverence. I ask Your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
You may have on some occasions seen pictures of the catacombs in Rome. They are calculated to make an extraordinary impression on the Christian soul, an impression utterly unlike the impression made by any Christian monument of any age or any kind.
If you visit there, you make your way down a steep stairway into those tunnels in the soft, unyielding rock, and come into a world which is silent, yet instinct with speech. You see long passages hollowed out, and on either side the loculi, the tombs of the saints. There are miles of these passages. In spite of the silence, the whole place seems to be alive in a way that is completely indescribable. A tomb gives the impression of complete silence, of being shut away. But in the catacombs, it is an impression of a living, vital presence.
In the catacombs, everybody experiences a complicated feeling, a feeling that is difficult to analyze. One enters an opening and descends the steps, and in a flash one is in contact with the very origins of Christianity. The intervening centuries are annihilated. One gets the impression of a world of mind and soul and even of body, a world in which Christianity was a vital, living, present experience, a world of intense reality, a world for which the veils that fall between us and supernatural things seem to disappear, and one had a living, vivid, almost tangible experience of Christ Himself.
And Christ is not something narrowed, but as filling the whole universe, heaven and earth. Christ is pervading all life, and those whom they placed there, and whose bodies have dissolved into dust, give the impression of men and women for whom life was complete reality, for whom heaven was the thing and earth was nothing. Again and again you see on unbroken slabs the words Requiescat in pace. In these words, or similar ones, you have the perfect assurance of the passage from the phenomena of earth into the face-to-face vision and presence of God.
In every case, there is that tranquil assurance of an opening into eternity, of a gladness, a buoyancy, a joyous emancipation, a coming to and being with God. There is never a note of sadness or of doubt, never a trace of misgiving on our part that all is not well with the departed. You have for miles and miles nothing but this note of dissolving into God. You do not find this note at any other period of Christianity. In our own, you have an obscurity and perplexity due to a greater conflict between what is of God and what is not of God, which makes life for the Christian complex, and which deepens the obscurity of faith, while darkening the world to come with certain shadows. All this is absent from the catacombs. There is a world without shadows, a world where you have the assurance that God and Christ are a reality.
For us, the Church would have us recapture this same experience on the feast of All Saints. We are close to the hard realities of life: our toil, our work, our contact with brute earth, economics, buildings, pursuits, labors, undertakings, teaching, nursing, all of which impress a reality on us of a hard kind, a reality of this world, with the result that the world of the spirit, in which God is the illumination and which vibrates with God's own life, becomes very remote. The Church gives us the feast of All Saints and, drawing aside the veil, gives us a glimpse of that world of light and splendor which is really ours.
The feast of All Saints is meant to remind us of those who are gone, and of those who will in time go into this world of light and splendor. They are all those who have lived in faith and died in the Lord, and are now glorious with light and life. With an effort of faith we can be in touch with it, and realize that one day it will be ours. For us too, humble beings that we are, as with the early Christians, Christ is all in all. At a touch, He will transform our whole being from glory to glory, living a divine life. All shadows, all imperfections, obscurities, sins, faults, all contrarieties will be swept away, and nothing will be left but the pure expression of Christ Himself.
Our Lord would have us rise to that concept of ourselves, that we are always in the condition of beings capable of being touched at any moment by Christ with this splendor, in spite of the drab appearance of our lives. It is only justice to Him, really, to believe that. He gives us the assurance in many ways that, in spite of the workaday world round about us, the world of splendor stands ready to be revealed at any moment. “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you… For my yoke is sweet and my burden light” (Matt. 11:28–30).
How often have we heard and read these words? Perhaps we seized the sense, but how rarely does the profound significance and reality of the words come home to us. So it is always with the Scriptures. We understand the terms and words and clauses, but we grasp them only with our minds. It is completely different when we grasp them with our souls. For this we need more than the knowledge of language. It is not a text that gives us life, but life touched with experience. Experience comes to us, and then what was before a mere statement suddenly bursts into splendor, which illuminates our whole existence.
There are few statements more consoling in Scripture than this one that we have just quoted. It throws a flood of light on God's attitude towards us and towards our life. “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened.” It is very consoling that God, who is Almighty, should tell us this one thing: that He recognizes that our life is a hard and heavy burden, that it is not a thing He thinks lightly of, but one which He understands and weighs at its worth.
How wonderful it is that He deigns to tell us this, that we are persons weighed down with care and trials and sorrows. He does not treat our sorrows or trials as children's and regard them as trivial. He does not regard them as of no consequence. He calls them a heavy burden and sees us as heavy-laden. He shows us profound sympathy and understanding as a consequence.
It can be a great consolation to us to see that God's attitude is not that of a dispassionate, just, impartial judge sitting on his tribunal, noting our efforts to be good, judging us kindly, ready to applaud our success, but also unsympathetic towards our faults. He is not there like a music examiner, calculating our capacities, noting the tone, execution, and other features of musical display. That notion is entirely foreign to God. He is there, judging us kindly, prepared to approve every effort on our part. But He is also noting, taking it with the extremely tender love of a father who realizes all our experiences and knows that they are hard. It is not God, but we ourselves, who have made life hard, and God submits to the operation of His own laws. We are the ones who have perhaps made our life hard, but God will take steps to secure that the effects of the burden we have made for ourselves may be remedied, and that we shall not suffer, if we will but accept His aid, from those things that of themselves might make us suffer.
Therefore, Our Lord shows Himself in that quotation profoundly sympathetic with our whole life experience. He shows us that He is not unfeeling, not without understanding, not a Stoic. He confesses that we have burdens to bear, and heavy ones. He confesses that at all times we are crushed with trials and sorrows, and avows that his whole eagerness as a friend is to come and retrieve that situation for us. “Come to me… and I will refresh you” (Matt. 11:28). He does not say perhaps He will be able to help us, but rather that He is in a position to deal with the situation, so that we are not crushed. Thus, things become light.
It would help us to understand how we are to come to an attitude of soul in which we can deal with the burdens of life and find it a yoke which is light and sweet. He does not tell us that He is going to take it from our shoulders, although we might expect that He would. And why would He not? Because perhaps that is impossible. Life must be what life is, a thing woven of human experiences for each. These depend on birth, education, contacts, on money or loss of money, position, bereavements; all these make up life, and must make up our life. He cannot take the burden of life from us without taking life itself, that tissue of pleasant and painful experiences.
But note what He can do. He can take it all, with its light and shade, and transubstantiate it and change it. “My yoke is sweet and my burden light” (Matt. 11:30). He makes it His and not the world's. He makes it His burden. It is still a burden, but it is ours and His, not any longer that of the world, that of those who bear it apart from Christ. He would have it our burden in Christ, a totally different thing, that He undertakes, so that what would be crushing for our own strength we can carry with Him. He wishes to insinuate His shoulders into ours, His mind into ours, His heart into ours, His strength into ours, if only we will it.
One burden He completely takes from us: the burden of sin. That He will not lighten, but will make disappear altogether like a vapor. But the burdens of life, the experiences which are not sinful, He must permit to remain on our shoulders. That He leaves to us. It may gall us, but He arranges that it shall not gall us while remaining a burden. A burden is calculated to crush and exhaust us. He secures that it will not crush or exhaust us. He will not lighten it, but He will make us strong. He cannot change the nature of the burden, that which makes it heavy, but He makes us strong. A weight of twenty-eight pounds is heavy for a child, but nothing to a man, though it is the same weight. So Christ gives us vigor and strength, which enables us to bear the burden that He cannot take from us, and which would be crushing and exhausting for ourselves alone.
We are not transformed by an odd prayer, but only by life itself, by living life in all its phases. We cannot be sanctified by stepping aside from life's duties on the plea of being absorbed in prayer. Every experience of the twenty-four hours, including sleep, is of value if we are united to Christ and borrow His strength to enable us to sanctify it. If we do this, we are changed. This is the material of eternity.
Mind that truth. It is not the few hours of prayer, not the specifically spiritual exercises, which change us and make us divine; rather, the whole is meant to make us become what Christ wants us to become. Every experience, not only the hard things, not only the joys, but all: the sorrows, the joys, the enjoyment, the sleep, the work, the eating and drinking, all are needed. Life is a material woven of many colors and of a great variety of threads, all of which form the pattern which is to make us like unto Christ. There are the gold threads of our prayer, the purple of sorrow, the green of hope, the red of suffering, the gray of our work, the white of joy; all are woven into one piece, one fabric, which is meant to make us what God wants us to be. Accept all, the pattern and the weaving, and ask Christ to uphold us, until it becomes for us that wedding garment with which we shall be clothed among the saints whose feast day we are now celebrating.
If the veil were drawn aside and we could see heaven, we would see thousands and thousands of persons who were to us very workaday nondescripts, but who are perhaps now transformed and shining in glory. Millions of the most ordinary people with whom we have come in contact are now in glory. In each of us there is the material of that same glory, in the measure we take Christ as ours, and according to the greater or lesser degree in which we make our burden His.
Therefore, we do not confine our life to our times of prayer; we rather try to convert everything into prayer. Everything that makes up life is of value. The role of our time of prayer is to consecrate the whole fabric of life, not to have it as a thing standing apart. Prayer, union with God, is what transubstantiates the whole of life's experiences. That is the reason why life borne with Christ is such a joyous, buoyant thing. From this we see the importance of our presence of God, of rectifying our intention, of having a unity of life. And that is the reason why our life should be joyous. Christ has said that His yoke is sweet. It is hard only if it is left to ourselves to bear; not so if He is permitted to take it and change it into His own.
Let us ask Our Lady that, day by day, she might remind us of this wonderful invitation of Jesus: “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you” (Matt. 11:28). Our Lady will help us to convert our every day into a response to that joyous invitation.
I thank You, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that You have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask Your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW