ALL SOULS’ DAY raises the question of our relationship with the dead. While medieval Catholicism understood the burying of the dead as one of seven corporal acts of mercy, and built chantry chapels to ensure that the dead were prayed for, the Reformers opened up a yawning gap between the dead and the living. To pray for the dead was presumptuous, a vain attempt to subvert God’s sovereign justice.
In England, this aspect of Reformed teaching took a while to filter through. The Burial Service in the first English Prayer Book of 1549 had the dead person being addressed by the minister and his soul commended to God as his body was committed to the ground. But the 1559 Prayer Book allowed only the most general of petitions, that: “We may rest in Him [Christ] as our hope is that this our brother doth.” Even this was too inclusive for some. Reformed funerals were sometimes at night, without prayer or ceremony.
These days, the options are wider. All Souls’ Day can be observed as an optional Lesser Festival, an opportunity for good choirs to sing one of the popular Requiems. Funerals have changed, too. The proposed 1928 Prayer Book allowed for the deceased to be addressed, as do contemporary pastoral services: “Go forth upon your journey from this world” (not quite as haunting as the traditional “O Christian soul”). Most of our Reformation forebears would not have approved.
If the Reformers widened the gap between the living and the dead, contemporary secular practice is to protect the living from death’s physicality. Bodies are routinely disposed of without ceremony, and funerals have become celebrations of a life.
What the more extreme 16th-century Reformers and our secular neighbours miss is an opportunity to greet the corpse and to say goodbye to the person we have actually known, not the idealised version so often represented by well-meaning eulogies. These days, the chasm that we have created between ourselves and death is filled by flying things, ghosts and witches, and grinning pumpkins with their empty orange light.
All Souls’ Day reminds us of our own mortality. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It is good to remember that we are only temporary residents on earth, that we pass into insignificance like the autumn leaves. Yet the hope is that love still accompanies us. Richard Hooker saw funerals as an expression of our affection for the deceased, an opportunity for the solidarity and comfort of public grief.
An agreed statement from ARCIC suggests that the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed on All Souls’ Day should be seen as an affirmation of the unity and mutual support of the whole people of God. When we cross the Jordan river, there are friends on the other side, as well as those who gather to see us off.
Read Sarah Sands’s reflection on All Souls’ Day in this week’s Faith section here.