Honor the Faithful Departed: Catholics in November
We’ve made it through the holiday of Halloween. We’ve dressed our houses and ourselves in ghoulish garb and eaten our fill of candy (and maybe an apple from a disgruntled dentist neighbor). Now we enter a month where we reflect a little more on the ‘reason for the season’: the reality of death. Death comes for us all; it is an inescapable fate that each of us must pass through in the end. Death is frequently capitalized in the Scriptures because it’s more than a natural physical process. Death is a power that stands in opposition to God and His plan for Eternal Life. Yet as I mentioned in my homily today, Death has been trampled on by Christ through His own death. The power of Death has been definitively defeated, crushed, eliminated, abolished, destroyed; though it can and will bite each and every one of us, it cannot hold us and releases us into God’s care as soon as it touches us. For those who pass over to the other side, Death will appear impotent and weak alongside Almighty God.
This reality does not mean that grief shouldn’t afflict those who remain. Those who pass beyond may be (God willing) entering everlasting happiness, but we down here still miss them. Yet we do not grieve as though without hope because we know that Jesus has taken the sting of Death away forever for those who die. If this is the truth (and I believe it is), how should we honor the memory of our beloved dead during this month of November?
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Visit the dead. Cemeteries used to be common places for people to visit their loved ones, but the practice has declined as we’ve tried to avoid thinking about death. Yet visiting our loved ones where their mortal remains lie connects us to them and reminds us of our own mortality.
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Offer Masses. We know that our loved ones who are not perfect by the end of life will spend some time in the preparatory phase we call Purgatory. We can and should pray for them, and the most powerful form of prayer is to have a Mass offered for them. Contact the parish office for available dates.
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Gain indulgences. A beautiful way to benefit our faithful departed is to perform acts of charity and prayer that have indulgences attached to them. These indulgences are actions that God uses to pay down some of the spiritual debt our loved ones built up during life. We can gain indulgences for ourselves or offer them lovingly to God on behalf of our faithful departed.
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Pray the Rosary. The Blessed Virgin Mary is Our Lady of Sorrows and Comfort of the Afflicted who shares our grief and helps us by meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries of Christ’s Passion and Death to see the meaning behind suffering.
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Offer sacrifices. We can take on small penances during this month (skip a condiment or a snack, pebble in our shoe, lukewarm shower, no snooze button, technology fast) and offer them to our departed loved ones.
May your November be a beautiful time of prayer for the faithful departed and may they, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.