Daily Reflection
November 2, 2025

The first time I remember attending a funeral service of someone I loved, my grandma, my mom’s mom, was when I was five.  My mother was raised Methodist but converted to the Catholic faith when she married my father.  So, since my mom’s mother was Methodist, the funeral service was held at the local First United Methodist Church of which they were members.  I bring this memory up, because I am as of this date, at 62, fifty-seven years older, yet even though I may be in my dotage, I remember every moment of that day, and I remember every experience with my grandma Jensen, with love. 

One of the things I love about our faith is the notion that the temporal (earthly) and the eternal (divine) are not divorced from one another.  We believe in the Communion of the Saints, that we are ‘one with’ the Saints of our Catholic heritage, so too then, it just seems natural that we extend this belief to all the faithful departed, those family friends who have passed, as a great Communion of All Souls. 

 As they say, the proof is in the pudding, and the messages in our readings and gospel assure us of this relational connection between the eternal and the temporal in our love for one another.  God’s love for us never dies. We have faith in this in the reality of God’s love, when God as Jesus, lived among us, was put to death, yet rose. This resurrection of a love that never dies for us, therefore extends to us, sons and daughters, as heirs to the promise. 

The Book of Wisdom assures us that the souls of the just who have passed live on in the hand of God, in peace, and abide with God in eternal love.  The Letter to the Romans exclaims that,  if one has died in faith with Christ, so too do they continue to live on, have life, with him.  Finally, our Gospel from John gives us the sacrosanct teaching of Jesus who confirms and affirms that ‘everyone who sees the Son and believes in him has eternal life, and [will be ] raised’.

Now, at the age of sixty-two I have faced the earthly reality of relationships’ physical ending, either through the loss of life either through earthly death, or through earthly relationships where one soul leaves another soul but together each of us still walks this earth yet no longer present to one another.  In either case, I still feel a deep and abiding sense of communion with each soul.  I remember them all.  And even though there is sadness and pain over these losses, the pain also points to the reality that there was, is, and will always be love there.

So, there is a definite ache in the heart planted over the loss of any soul in our lives.  And for me, when that happens, I am grateful for a quote given to me by a friend when I was mourning a particularly hard loss.  This quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran Pastor imprisoned for his resistance of the Nazis in WWII is found in his work Letters and Papers from Prison:

“Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”

So, even in that pain we recall, in our remembrances of all the souls who touched our lives ever-living memories, memories full of life, and of passion, and of all goodness, and perhaps here, in this space of commemoration, in those souls who have touched our lives,  we can find a way to feel again the grace to rejoice and give thanks.