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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Holy Souls

The Holy Souls

If the dead were truly dead there would be little point in thinking about them, let alone praying for them.

But since the human race began, nearly all cultures and communities have intuitively recognised that the dead are their neighbours.

They have initiated ceremonies of burial. They have in various ways made provision for the souls of the dead. The Egyptians were accustomed to place a lifelike and lifesize statue of the dead man in his tomb so that his soul could inhabit it until the body rose again on the Day of Resurrection. The Tibetans conducted ceremonies, the chief purpose of which was to instruct the soul of the person who had died so that it would pass unharmed through the dangers of the other world either to the state of Nirvana or to a fortunate rebirth.

We should not despise the religious intuitions of the pagan world. However complex and bizarre, or even corrupt, their doctrines might be concerning the gods of nature and the way in which they might be propitiated when they considered death their intuitive speculation often led them curiously close to Christian revealed truth. A moment of personal judgment; safety through identification with a god who had been slain and risen again from the dead; the need for purification; a sense of continuity between the living and dead ancestors who were stronger beyond the grave to help and protect them than they had ever been on earth – the similarities between pagan and Christian belief about the afterlife are so considerable that many sceptical anthropologists have thought it likely that Christianity acquired its fundamental doctrines from these earlier religions.

We who know that Our Lord truly died and truly rose again cannot accept these cloudy generalisations. Nevertheless we have the right to suppose that the Incarnation and the Resurrection sent ripples backwards in time as well as forward to our own day.

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God does not, like us, live in time. Therefore it is in no way foolish to suppose that a religious-minded caveman could be affected spiritually by events that had not yet occurred in history. He might dream of a virgin spring goddess giving birth to a son who was slain and rose again; and (who knows?) by his fidelity to that dream he may have obtained salvation, since that was the form in which God had given him an imperfect knowledge of Our Lord and Our Lady. Such matters are disputable but theologically possible.

What is indisputable is that a vast number of modern people are more spiritually deprived than the caveman whom they would regard as an ignorant savage if they met him; for they do not dream dreams or see visions, however cloudy, or accept any revealed truth, but recognise no religious pattern in life on earth and expect no life beyond the grave. To them death is an inescapable and bitterly resented horror. They flee from it, yet cannot gain relief by making that fear articulate, as Thomas Nashe, living in an age of belief , was able to do in his ‘Litany in Time of Plague’:

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness.
Hell’s executioner
Has no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us! . . .

We do not find such litanies in the age of the hydrogen bomb; not because the nature of life and death has changed, but because religious truth has vanished from the minds of many.

We should be glad that the unchangeable voice of the Church delivers us from that desert of inanity. She does not tell us that we will not die, but that it is appointed to man to die once and after that the Resurrection. And she infallibly instructs us concerning life beyond the grave.

When we pray for the souls of those who have died, we make an implicit act of faith at many levels. We affirm our belief in the immortality of the soul – in the existence of a state of purgation after death in which the Holy Souls are prepared for the Beatific Vision – in the willingness of God to hasten that purgation – in the power of the Church Militant to assist the Church Suffering – in the efficacy of Our Lord’s descent into the abode of the dead, between His own Death and His Resurrection. These things are implied by our faithful acts of intercession.

There is always a link between destitution and the openness of any given soul to the Divine Will. For this reason the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven lie wide open to the poor, though they are stiff to move for those who are attached to material possessions.

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And what man on earth can be as poor as one of the Holy Souls? They have no possessions. They do not eat or drink. The whole unconscious support of the created world has been removed from them.

They do not even possess bodies. This poverty must be one of the chief causes of their joy; since joy and poverty go hand in hand as the Little Poor Man of Assisi long ago demonstrated to us.

They also suffer, as a result of past attachments which prevent the light of God from reaching fully to their hearts. When we make spiritual gifts to them, either at the altar or in private – gifts that God has put into our hands so that we may pass them on – these gifts are designed to increase their poverty, not to lessen it. Our prayers will strip them of the shroud of repented but not wholly expiated sin. Then at length they will truly go naked into Heaven.

We should be glad that the Church has chosen in our own generation to remove almost entirely the mechanical process of indulgences which seemed in earlier times to reduce the efficacy of intercessory prayer to the functioning of a spiritual cash register – ‘So many Hail Marys; so many souls released from bondage. . . .’ That way was far from the free spirit of Our Lord, who had only to say to His dead friend – ‘Lazarus, come forth!’

But we should remember that Our Lord wept on that occasion; and we are free to imitate Him, asking for the deliverance of our friends – and of a million people we have never seen but may yet see in Heaven – with inward tears on account of their faults and our own that so clog the effect of Christ’s desire that we should be wholly at one with Him. I believe that one true prayer of this kind will be worth a thousand repeated by rote. It is not repetition but one’s disposition that makes prayer efficacious. The Church is reminding us of this well-known fact.

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