Why We Pray

All Souls' Day (1888) by Jakub Schikaneder

The second of November is not a day that usually stands out on our calendars. But, as we know, this year is anything but usual. Each of us has had to consider in a new way the fragility of our lives – the fact that we are mortal and that tomorrow is not promised to us. And each of us knows persons who have died this year, from the COVID pandemic or from some other cause. In a special way today, as we celebrate this All Souls Day, we lift them up in prayer.

Grief is the natural consequence of our familiarity with death – both experiencing that of others and anticipating our own. We deal with that grief in different ways: we communicate with others about how important that person was to us; we hold on to our fond memories with them; sometimes we even continue to talk to them. As Christians, and especially as Catholics, we do something more, something even better and more loving for them: we pray for them.

Your presence at Mass today shows that you understand this. Our culture doesn’t know how to deal with death. It wants to tuck it away out of sight in denial; it can’t wrestle with it without falling into despair. But our faith teaches us that death, as painful as it is, is part of life, and specifically that part of life that leads us to eternal life. To pray for our deceased loved ones then is to express our desire to God that they should now participate in that eternal life. In other words, prayer for them is an act of love, and prayer at Mass – especially the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass – is the greatest gift we can give to another. In prayer, and especially at Mass, we commend the faithful departed to the One who has conquered sin and death and who now lives forever.

I think we sometimes don't want to pray for the deceased because we think that means admitting they had faults; that they weren’t perfect. But to pray for our loved ones who have died doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Far from it! We live in a broken world, full of wounds and hurts, and that includes also all of us who live in it. We all have our sins and regrets and sorrows. While we pray to be free from those and absent of any guilt at the close of our lives, the reality is not always that way. We pray for our loved ones not because we do not trust in God’s mercy, but because we trust he might use our prayers precisely as a means for his mercy. And if, by the greatness of God’s mercy, our loved ones are not in need of our prayers because they are already in heaven? God doesn’t let those prayers go to waste; he helps us with them, or perhaps a soul who has been forgotten, who has no one else to pray for them.

Friends, in this very challenging year, it is good that we are here to pray for our loved ones, and to pray also for ourselves, that we might remember always what our faith teaches us about trials, grief, and especially death and eternal life. As we prepare to receive the Lord in this Eucharist, may he have mercy on all of us, living and deceased, and grant us his consolation and peace.