The month brings us once more to the end of the Church’s year with thoughts of the Kingdom of Heaven. All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days and the feast of Christ the King bring the cycle of celebrations to an end on a note of triumph. We say in the Creed each Sunday that we “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” in Latin “looking for” is “expecto”, “I expect” and looking for can suggest an earnest searching for and looking forward to the great awakening.
This Christian expectation is not icing on the cake or an optional extra to all the other articles of our creed but flows from them and is an important part of them. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable” says Saint Paul. (I. Cor. 15 v. 19)
For many people today the seduction of the sciences, once called “natural philosophy” has taken away from them the greater vision and hope beyond the changes and chances of this fleeting world. As a consequence, they are, as Saint Paul’s words suggest, deserving of God’s mercy or “miserere”, pity, because they have no sure foundation for spiritual growth and moral decisions beyond their own feelings and ideas and the conventions and laws of the human society in which they live. In this world, as Jesus said, we all have tribulations, not only as Christians but simply as men and women we are “born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.” (Job. 5 v. 7). Our Faith is that Christ has overcome the world, even to its last enemy, death itself and that is why we say we look for and look forward to and dare to expect the resurrection to eternal life with our Lord in his Kingdom.
The sacramental life of the church points us to look beyond mere appearances. In the water poured, bread broken, the shared cup of wine, oil to anoint and in the words of promise and forgiveness of the sacraments we see and know with our eyes and ears, mouths to taste and hands to touch the “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” which are pointers to and bringers of life in God’s greater reality.
Natural sciences only deal with what can be quantified by measurement and observation. The whole experimental method seeks to isolate a tiny part of the complex whole of creation, to control everything around it and measure and assess the effects of our known actions upon it. Those who are accustomed to this method and procedure should beware of the temptation to think that their results lead to a conclusion that that is all there is and nothing more. To make that claim for the complete and self-contained nature of the world is just as much an act of faith as claiming that God ultimately creates and upholds everything in existence. In human experience we know that there are qualities such as beauty, goodness, love, the joy of art and music which are important and real and well-known but which cannot be handled in the same way as subjects of scientific investigation. There is in our common experience a whole lot more than just what we can see and measure.
The recently opened and hugely costly experiment called the Large Hadron Collider may reveal more interesting information about the world in which we live and the matter of which we are composed. There is even talk about the Higgs Boson or “God Particle” which may show up and help to explain and pull together existing theories about the structure of matter, but this is not a theological “experiment” which will lead to the sort of truths dealt with by faith and moral philosophy. For Christian theology the whole of the observable world can be seen as an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”, indeed, this is the foundation of “natural” theology running parallel with “revealed” theology which deals with God’s self disclosure, for Christian theologians especially in God revealed in Jesus. Saint Paul in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans speaks of the world and its very existence as revealing God the Creator to us. Poetically, a thousand years before, the Psalmist expressed it as “the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork”. On the other hand the hope and promise of resurrection and eternal life, how we live and meet the moral demands of right and wrong and, beyond that, know the gifts of grace, goodness, love and forgiveness, all these come from what we by faith believe has been revealed to us by Jesus in his teaching, the nature of his divine person with us in human flesh and the meaning of his life, death and resurrection.
“The communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”, at the end of the Apostles’ Creed sums up the themes for this month. We enjoy the company and encouragement of the saints in glory as they cheer us on to run our race of faith. We do not coldly ignore or forget those faithful Christian souls whom we have loved and who have helped us on our way in this world but who have died. Still we remember them with love in our prayers with thanksgiving and especially of course during November remember the heroic souls who sacrificed their lives in wars in defence of our country and way of life. All Souls’ Day commemorates, as the name implies, all Christian souls departed this life and for whom we pray and offer the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in the Eucharists. More specifically each week in November there will be a Requiem Mass at which particular people will be remembered – put the names you wish to be mentioned on the list beside the date of the Mass you hope to attend. Each day, week in, week out at all our masses we do not forget to pray for the Christian dead since they are “alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord”. God’s forgiveness is for us all and we ourselves must be agents of that forgiveness and reconciliation in the world where there is conflict between individuals and alienation from God. Finally the Creed leads up to our own resurrection to eternal life in God’s presence. We are not absorbed into a world-soul or lost like drops of water lose themselves in the sea. The hope and mystery of resurrection is for each of us as we are, with sins and defects taken away. I like to remember the verse of the fifteenth century hymn translated by J M Neale:
O how glorious and resplendent,
Fragile body shalt thou be.
When endued with so much beauty,
Full of health and strong and free.
Full of vigour, full of pleasure
That shall last eternally.
It’s not a bad expression in poetic terms of our faith in these last articles of the Creed. Sing it to yourself as you go along this month. Thank God for our “hope of glory”!
