Why We Pray for All Souls - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you. Friends, we have a privilege this year because All Souls Day, November 2, falls on a Sunday. So we can really spend some time reflecting on this wonderful feast, which means a lot to Catholic people. I know all my years doing pastoral ministry, my years in the parish, All Souls Day means a lot. A time to pray for our beloved den. And I wonder if I could begin by just reflecting a bit on soul. Why we speak of the soul, All Souls Day. Well, I go right back to the book of Genesis, the very beginning, that first account of creation. What do we find? We find that God makes Adam from the dust of the earth, from the mud, the clay of the earth, and then breathes into him, like he's a mannequin or a doll, and then breathes into him the breath of life. And that word breath in Hebrew is one that's often translated as soul.

0:59 But see what that poetic image is communicating. There's a dimension of us that belongs irreducibly to the earth. We are animals. We're close cousins to many animals. All living things are related to us. We come from the earth. remember your dust and to dust you shall return. We have these emotions that we share with many of the animals and reactions and the nerves and muscles and all of that. We get hungry and thirsty and we get tired and we have to sleep. And there's an earthiness about us that can't be denied, shouldn't be denied. It's part of God's creation, what God wanted. He didn't make us angels. He did make angels. They've got their own manner of being. But he made us precisely as earthlings, as embodied realities. But that's not all we are.

1:57 Because he breathed into these animal bodies the breath of life. Now, don't interpret that as this breath. I mean, what I'm taking now into my lungs, that belongs to my animal nature, my embodied nature. What's being communicated here is something more subtle, I think. God breathes something of his life and his manner of being into us. We're made indeed in his image and likeness. It doesn't mean our bodies. God doesn't have a body. So how are we in God's image and likeness? Well, we have in us this principle that links us to the immaterial.

2:42 We're earthly, yes, indeed, but there is something angelic in us. Something higher—mind and will and freedom and creativity, religion, what connects us to sacred and holy things. We're a hybrid. We're a hybrid. We're embodied souls. We're in souled bodies. We're not one or the other. And can you see, everybody, up and down the centuries, there's a tendency to try to resolve this tension on one side or the other, to deny the spiritual dimension. That's what material is today. No, we're just animals. That's all we are. We're sophisticated animals with bigger brains. And when we die, we die like animals, and that's it. Then there are people across the centuries that kind of go the other way and say, no, we're basically—we're souls and we're trapped inside these bodies. The idea is to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. I think much of the poetry and drama literature of the world is conditioned upon this dynamic that we're both body and soul.

3:45 Look at Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. I mean, you see the embodied quality for sure in those gorgeous depictions of the human form. But you also see on that ceiling the spiritual dynamic and dimension. Okay, the right resolution is not to emphasize one at the expense of the other, but to find the harmony between them. Now, I mentioned this tendency to over-spiritualize. See that in this whole Platonic tradition. It goes right back to Plato, but comes up through the ages. The idea there is that the soul is kind of trapped in the body like a prisoner. And the point is to have a prison break, is to get out of the body, get away from it, get up to the spiritual realm as quickly as you can. I think, as I say, it goes up and down the centuries. Gnosticism, the oldest heresy the Church has fought, is characterized by this.

4:40 But you can see it today. Does this rhetoric sound familiar? Well, there's my body that was given to me at birth, but then there's the real me. There's the person I really am deep down, and it's out of step with the body, and I want to remake my body to bring me in touch with the real me. Ay, ay, ay. That's not biblical talk. That's Platonic, Gnostic talk, that the soul, the real me, is kind of buried deep down in there. The body is sort of at odds with it. That's not biblical anthropology. Look at St. Thomas Aquinas, my spiritual and intellectual hero. Thomas resisted the Platonic understanding of the soul-body relationship. He adopted Aristotle's. Aristotle said the soul is the first principle of life in a living thing. It's the form of the body, meaning not the physical contour of the body.

5:37 It means the organizing principle of the body, that which makes this body truly human, the first principle of life in a living thing. Thomas says, for example, we're embodied creatures. Yes, indeed. But we have a capacity to engage in sheer abstractions. Think of how the mind can know a number. I don't mean like looking around the world, saying there are three things over there. But I mean when you have the number three in your mind. Now, make it more complex. You have an equation like three plus seven equals ten in your mind. You're not looking at three things here, seven things there, and then adding them up. No, no, you're grasping a sheer intelligibility. How about when you entertain the abstract notion of justice or of humanity or of truth? How about when you contemplate the quadratic formula?

6:32 See, in all these ways, the mind is revealing its capacity to rise above the merely sensible, the merely perceptible, to the invisible. I like the idea that mathematics is itself a kind of opening of a door to the spiritual. Yeah, it sure is. It sure is. We're animals, uh-huh, but animals into whose body God has breathed this higher form, this higher capacity called the soul. Okay, what's the upshot of that? The upshot is it's not true that when we die, we die just like a dog or like a horse or any other earthly creature. No, the body does indeed die. It goes back to the earth.

7:24 But this spiritual dimension of us survives, is not subject to death in the physical sense. And so we do indeed speak of souls, souls that exist in the presence of God after life here on earth. Now, some of these souls are pure, ready completely to see God face to face. They're in heaven. We call them saints. And we have communion with them.

8:04 You know, a saint for a Christian is not just a model of the spiritual life, someone that I read about and find inspiring. No, no, a saint is a friend. A saint's a companion. —listen now—existing in this higher spiritual world, but which impinges upon this world. It's not a Platonic game we're playing here, whereby we escape from this lowly world to get as far away as possible. No, no. What we call the spiritual, just as my soul now, impinges upon my body, influences my body. So the spiritual realm is in a way closer to us than we are to ourselves, in a way it contains, touches upon the physical. And so we can reach out in our prayer. You know, Thomas Aquinas, for me, is not just a philosopher from long ago or a theologian I admire.

9:03 Aquinas is a friend whom I talk to on a regular basis. I communicate with him. I ask him to intercede for me. So the saints in heaven. But then, let's be honest here, fellow sinners, most of us who die, even who die in friendship with Christ, still aren't perfectly prepared to receive the beatific vision. Not because of any reluctance on God's part. God wants all of us to come to fullness of life. But we are, because of our sin, incapable of taking in that vision fully. What do we need? Well, the Church speaks of purgatory, purgation, a sort of cleansing by fire. Now, don't literalize that.

9:55 That's a symbol. Cleansing by fire means that something in us, in our souls, needs to be burned away. And painfully so. Yeah. I mean, look at our lives here below. Whenever we try to rest ourselves away from the influence of some sinful form of life, or we try to resist a temptation. It's painful, isn't it?

10:20 Well, so, in purgatory, we describe symbolically as a place of fire because it's a cleansing, it's a burning away. I want to give you kind of a gentler metaphor I learned from Cardinal George, my mentor. He said, imagine there's kids playing in kind of a muddy backyard, and they've gotten themselves all sweaty and dirty, and then the word comes through that their grandmother has arrived. Hey, grandma's here. She wants to see you. But the kid's mother say, all right, you can see the grandma, but you first have got to get yourselves cleaned up. You're not ready right now to receive her. And so the kids have to be cleansed and purified before they're ready for that encounter. It's a different metaphor from the cleansing fire, but sort of the same idea. So do we recognize, everybody, that there are a lot of souls of people that we knew, souls over time, that are going through this purgation process?

11:25 And therefore, is it appropriate for us to remember them indeed, but more than that, to pray for them? Yep, absolutely. It's the best way we can stay in contact with them. I think of my mother and father. My father died many years ago. My mother just fairly recently. But, I mean, all the time. I got pictures of them down in the kind of den in my house. And whenever I look at those pictures, I pray for them. Last year, I was back in Chicago for a visit, and I wasn't too far from the cemetery where they're both buried. I went over there, and at their graves, of course, I prayed for them. I didn't just remember them. I prayed for them. That's what All Souls Day is all about. So can I urge everybody today, become consciously mindful of souls who've gone before us, people that you knew and loved.

12:24 Don't just remember them fondly. That's a good thing to do. But pray for them. And as you do it, realize they're not far away. They don't think of it as, well, here's Earth, and then there's Jupiter is way far away, and then there's some galaxy even further. No, that's physical distance. We're not talking about that. We're talking about a kind of qualitative difference. They're in a different place, so to speak, but not one that's far away from us, that we can access them through our prayer. And All Souls Day is the great day at Mass, as you pray, maybe even with your family after dinner tonight. spend some time, pray the rosary for souls who've gone before us marked with the sign of faith. It's for those holy souls who long to be fully in the presence of God, whom we still love with the love of friendship.

13:28 Reach out to them today in prayer. Ask the Lord to continue to purify them and bring them closer to himself. And God bless you.