All Saints and All Souls

“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” John recounts to us. This is the heart of the passage. The Lamb is Jesus Christ, who shed His blood for our salvation. His blood does not merely remind us of suffering; it proclaims the victory of divine love over sin and death. This lamb will shepherd us to the springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. 

I remember reading this passage, especially these words, that God would wipe every tear from their eyes, after hearing that my friend and then uncle died in the space of a month. My uncle had been a refuge and light for me through my childhood - different, weird, learned, skeptical, contrarian, a dreamer - like me. I felt my insides shatter when I heard and then hollowed out. This was in my second year of seminary. I was struggling to be present to people at school. 

The person and priest who would become my PhD supervisor sat down with me. I told him that I had been reading God’s revelation to John (the book of Revelation) to try and take away my sadness and physical pain by knowing God’s grace more fully; but that instead, I’d felt fear, uncertainty, and yes, still deeply sad. I was quite young, and emotionally and practically naive. I believed that when it said that every tear would be wiped from our eyes, we should backtrack that to the present so that sadness and fear would simply dissipate with enough faith, certain faith. 

He replied to me: “Divine grace, in its awesome and miraculous form, is recognizable only in the context of our fear of God. I think everyone actually knows this. It is why our deaths and those of others, fill us with a certain kind of dread: what is this strange thing that is our existence, where does it go, to whom does it belong? Faith is that which opens this dread to God; but it does not alter the overwhelming character of its vista.” 

Part of the problem, as I see it, he said, is that the experience of love involves deep pain and regret. Does this all disappear "in the after life"? A friend who lost his son in a car accident is quite certain that "heaven" will not erase the pain he has felt; because that pain is made up of love. What I take the passage from Revelation to be saying is that, in heaven there will be no new pain; and the tears we have will be comforted ("wiped away"). But it does not mean that the character of our love in the face of loss will somehow disappear. This is the nature of the Catholic devotion to the "Heart of Jesus":  Jesus' love is ever suffering love: it is of this nature, whether this or that event lies before it; not just potentially ("capable of suffering"), but somehow in its very being. Ours too. That is a deeper love, period. So Heaven may well - surely will - turn pain into something joyful; and faith even here turns it into something hopeful. But to eradicate the suffering of losing someone who is bound to us, and we to them, would be to eradicate love itself. 

This radically changed not simply my intellectual understanding, but my willingness and ability to love others even through my fear of inevitably losing them. And this is why God’s revelation to John became one of the most powerful books for me: every time I read it I recognize how much God has changed me, opened me up, exposed my immaturity, my fear, my confusion, and my sins. By the time I reach its end now, instead of trying to simply parse out its fascinating coded language of symbols that send me through the Scriptures, I have opened my own heart and life to God. I have brought before him all of my fears and anxieties, all of my perceived failures, the most guttural cries over friends and family who have died and whom I long to see.

Now when reading it I often find myself overwhelmed as I see through John’s eyes: the gathering of all God’s people, the multitude - from Abraham and my first ancestor, to martyrs for the faith like St. Peter, St. Stephen, Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, to my friends and uncle, to Karen, Paul and Doug, to my mom and dad, to myself, to those of you in this room, to the faithful who will come after us - sheep gathered from all lands by the one true shepherd who laid down his life for us. I see us all standing before Christ in white robes not made clean by us to be sure; but made clean by Jesus’s own blood poured out for us, made pure so we could reside forever with God. 

Now as I read I am reminded continually of the Lamb's victory: Christ's triumph over spiritual and physical enemies. I see us brought through the veil of death into the fullness of life where with the whole communion of saints and souls who put their faith and trust in Christ, with the company of heaven, God’s angels included, bow down in fear and awe, praise and thanksgiving. With them I hear the sound of trumpets declaring the old things passing away and the new life in Christ ready to blossom. It is a powerful vision of hope to fuel me through the trials of this life, through losses and sadness, in faith, in hope, and with joy.  

While the world may regard the martyr who refuses to denounce faith in Christ, the person who refuses to take revenge, the one who offers compassion in place of judgement, the sick, suffering person as defeated/broken down/perplexed, or crushed, heaven sees the victory of faith. The power of persecutors/of disease/of decline is temporary; Christ's kingdom is eternal. With the saints, all souls who persist in their faith are victorious not because they have escaped every hardship, but because Christ has brought them, brought us, through our struggles, through death, into life in His kingdom. 

This vision of hope and joy - even when it stands alongside our fear of death, our grief in losing those to whom we have been bound, our struggles with our own frailty and brokenness - this revelation is part of what allows us to live out God’s calling here and now, whatever time we have left, to bear witness to Christ faithfully, even when doing so involves sacrifice, rejection, or loss. It reminds us that our end is not death, but true life; and not a life alone, but life with the communion of Saints of which you and I are a part. “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands … They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” AMEN