St Michael and All Angels, Paulsgrove
Eucharist for the Feast of All Souls
2nd November 2004
Readings:
Job. 19: 23-27
1 Jn. 3: 1-2
Jn. 14: 1-6
What happens when I die? The answer to that question affects all of us, and it will come home to us in particular ways in different circumstances. For example, someone I learned to love and admire a great deal died a few weeks ago who was a convinced atheist; a kindly, wise, observant person who – I sometimes thought – I would give all the tea in China in order to have him in the Church. Alongside individuals like that are many others who hedge their bets – they won’t say they are atheists, and we may see them at the occasional carol concert perhaps shedding the odd tear, as if what they are doing for that short space of time has somehow to ‘carry’ their own combination of faith and doubt until the next time, next year.
All these questions, of course, take me into further speculations: if I had been born – in Russia, I might be a Stalinist atheist or a devout Orthodox; in Calcutta, a keen Hindu; in Jerusalem, a zealous Jew. But I wasn’t, and there are no two ways about it. I was born as I was, and raised a committed but enquiring Christian. My commitment and the need to enquire about life have led me to look at many other answers as to why I am here; and I keep coming back to Christianity, because it is the best explanation I know. It doesn’t solve all life’s problems, like suffering, and it doesn’t iron out all its dilemmas, like why some Christians can be – and are – so beastly to each other. But it’s the best explanation, and therefore the most coherent way of life.
So what does happen when I die? I suppose it is really about the kind of God I believe in: a God I can’t quite accept will leave me here on earth, as if this were the end of it all; and even if it were, then God wouldn’t be worth believing in. He wouldn’t be God. He would be something else. He would be a nice, fine, good, kind ideal, about all of us being nice, fine, good and kind to each other, and no more. All very affirming, but really quite harmless.
I don’t really know what happens when I die. And I am not going to get involved in making judgements over exactly what God intends to do with others of his human creatures, also made in his image, who believe different things from me, or who do not believe in him at all. The Church, made up of human beings as it is, has the responsibility and privilege of doing its best to share the Good News with as many as it possibly can. But what about me? I have been with people when they have passed from this life, and have helped them through that moment, with those old words, ‘go forth upon my journey from this world O Christian soul’; and they have helped me, sometimes leaving behind as a gift their way of dying. But when I die, I don’t think I will be good enough for heaven, but I hope I won’t be bad enough for hell – which is why, even though I hope and expect to be outside space and time, somewhere in what we call God’s ‘nearer presence’, I hope, too, that others will pray for me, to express their love, their care, their concern for me. That is why All Souls’ Day is so important to the life of faith. It is not about dividing those who have died into two self-contained compartments, consisting of the Saints, who pray for us, and the departed, whom we must pray for ourselves, because one group has made it and the others haven’t. The Easter community isn’t quite like that. All Souls’ Day means surrounding those we have loved with an abiding love, a realistic love, recognising perhaps those occasions when we were driven up the wall by them, and when we drove them up the wall ourselves. Love and forgiveness go together both for us and in us, for them and in them – deep in the heart of God, who shows us the Way, the Truth, the Life, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
