The Unfinished Tapestry of Self

A very modern, and very wrong, picture of our humanity keeps us from understanding the significance of All Souls’ Day. We think of the human person as essentially independent, isolated within the self. There are two problems with this picture.

The Essential Relatedness

Here is the first. There has never been an “I” without a “you.” We become ourselves through our interactions with others. That essential relatedness begins long before our births and never ends, even in death. I never met my great-grandfather. I admire his intention, and I still live with its consequences, a full century later.

But that is only one strand of who I am. If one were to pull out all the threads that others have woven, there would be nothing left of me. The same is true of the tapestry you call yourself.

The Unfinished Work of Self

The second problem with our modern conception of self is that we fail to see that we never finish weaving ourselves. For as long as we live, even from our deathbeds, we strive to pull together projects and relationships. We die unfinished. We enter the kingdom in tatters, fragments of self.

The Meaning of Purgatory

All Souls Day is premised upon purgatory, a process that stands outside of space and time. Best to picture it as a process, not a place or a legal sentence.

In his mercy, God gathers up our fragments of self. He heals our wounds and brings the work we began—in him, always in him—to completion.

The Enduring Power of Our Relationships

If others are necessarily involved in the very creation of ourselves, how or why should their influence end at death?

We wound each other in life, but we also heal each other. We pray for each other in life, knowing that God is the immense, invisible ground of each of us. Why would God repudiate in the next life what he took such pains to fashion in this one? No, we remain human souls essentially bound to, composed by, our interaction with others.

If we enter death in tatters, which God must heal and weave together, why should our prayers for each other cease? We pray for the work that must be done after death just as we did before. And the dead, who know that their salvation is assured in Christ, continue to pray for us.

Prayer is the great recognition that we are not God, that we are not whole and complete within ourselves. We must implore our creator, our origin, not to abandon us but to accompany us. We pray as well for those countless souls who, quite simply, are our destiny, our completion. Why on earth, or in heaven, would one suppose that prayer, spiritual communion, should cease with death? We have only left this earth, not our fundamental rootedness in God and each other.

The Unseen Connection

All Souls’ Day is a day to remember those who have gone before us and to offer prayers for their continued journey toward God. It is a day to acknowledge the enduring power of our relationships and to recognize that our connection with others, even in death, remains a vital part of who we are. It is a day to pray for the souls of all who have died, and to ask for their intercession for us, as we continue our own journey toward eternal life.