Today, we pray for those souls who have striven to follow Christ, but find themselves in some need of purification before entering their eternal reward. As we do these good and holy works, it inevitably forces us to contemplate one very important reality of human existence: death.

One day, we will die. This truth is an inescapable fact of human life. Throughout human history, we have struggled to understand this reality of human existence. Religions exist, many have said, as a way to soften the impact of death. Even then, the ancient religions never saw death as a good thing for humans. The ancients’ gods of the underworld were, at best, ambivalent about the souls of the dead. At worst, all human souls were condemned to a miserable existence, and so they taught that if you were going to enjoy things, it had better be before you die. Even the rich and powerful, the emperors and kings, did not escape this. Sometimes they had a special place that was less miserable. I suspect that this is why the ancients began to say that their emperors and kings were descendants of the gods, because then, at least, their afterlife would be somewhat pleasant, and the spirit of all the people ruled by them would in some way endure.

This is not what our faith teaches.

In the ancient liturgy for the dead, which we celebrate on All Souls Day, we find ourselves caught between two realities. St. Ambrose summarizes well the most ancient teachings of our Church: “We see that death is gain, life is loss. Paul says: For me life is Christ, and death a gain. What does “Christ” mean but to die in the body and receive the breath of life? Let us then die with Christ, to live with Christ.”

St. Ambrose teaches us that we must live with death on our mind, because this allows us to recognize that we must detach from the things of this world and from the desires of our body. “It must take on the likeness of death, to avoid the punishment of death,” Ambrose says. This mirrors St. Paul who writes that “when this moral body put on immortality, then shall come to pass the word that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory!” This calls to mind the Epistle to Diognetus, where we hear:

5:5 They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign.
5:6 They marry like all other men and they beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring.
5:7 They have their meals in common, but not their wives.
5:8 They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh.
5:9 Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven.
(Lightfoot translation)

This kind of detachment, called for by Christ, echoed in the saints, allows us to laugh in the face of death, to say, with St. Paul, “Where, oh Death, is your victory? Where, oh Death, is your sting?” It allows us to long for the moment when we will join our Lord, when we hear his voice calling us to our true homeland, where the Father has prepared a place for us.

It is our struggle to live this detached life that results in the other strand of today’s liturgy. Amidst the ancient and victorious proclamations of St. Paul and of our Lord, we find the cries for mercy and assistance in the Dies Irae and the proper prayers of this Mass. We must recognize our own sinfulness and our inability to save ourselves. We must take seriously our unworthiness of such a gift from our Savior. It is helpful to ponder such things, but we must not allow them to consume us. These thoughts should lead us to repentance and to detachment from the desire for the things of this world. They should inspire us to plead for mercy from our loving God. They should not, however, inspire an irrational fear of judgment within us. The Church reminds us, over and over again, that death is powerless against Christ and it is powerless against those who have united themselves to him.

The preface to the Roman Canon proclaims, “In [Christ] our hope of blessed resurrection has shone forth, so that those saddened by the certainty of death may be consoled by the promise of immortality. For your faithful, Lord, life is changed not ended, and when their earthly dwelling is destroyed, eternally in heaven a dwelling is prepared.”

In yesterday’s Feast of All Saints and today’s Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, we look at Death and see how powerless it is against Christ, because he has conquered Sin and Death through the Cross. Death and Sin only have power over us if we permit them to. We must not give ourselves over to them in practice, and we must not, out of fear, define our existence as merely a legalistic avoidance of sin.

Instead, we must embrace the lot of the saints. May we live holy and just live, lives of repentance and detachment, lives united to the Body of Christ and enlightened by the Sacraments, lives full of joy and hope in the resurrection, so that when we pass from this earthly existence into the next part of our life, we can say with Christ and with St. Paul, “Where, oh Death, is your victory? Where, oh Death, is your sting?”