“Live each day as if it were your last.” We have all seen that bit of wisdom on a coffee mug or heard someone say that, but few of us actually get around to putting it into practice. Even when we are fully aware that our days are numbered, we can still leave our property, our documents, and our relationships in a gigantic kerfuffle when we depart this life.  The same is often true in our relationship with God. When we retired, we were going to join a Bible Study; when things slow down at work, we were going to spend time helping the homeless or attending to the migrants or tutoring students: we were going to see a priest in confession and make a clean slate of everything; we were going to address our addictions and habits of sins and put them behind us once and for all; we were going to get back to church every week. But the days and the weeks and the months and the Sundays continue to roll along, without any change whatsoever.

In last week’s column I wrote about how Catholic missionaries found creative ways to incorporate Celtic beliefs about ghosts into the celebration of All Saints Day and the Aztec beliefs about the spirits of the dead into All Souls Day. These feasts took place last week on November 1 and November 2. Most Catholics have some understanding about the role of saints as models to imitate and as friends and intercessors cheering us on to the finish line. What we are less likely to hear about is prayer for the dead. People who have died are prayed for at Mass, but how did that custom begin and what does it mean?

The custom of praying for the dead grew out of the reality with which we are all too familiar. When we die, we often die with unfinished business on our soul. There are all those things we were going to do but never got around to implementing. About two hundred years before Christ and long before Rome conquered the Holy Land, a family of Jewish patriots called the Maccabees started an armed revolt against their Greek oppressors. Among the ancient peoples, the Jewish people had one of the least developed concepts of the afterlife. It was sometimes referred to as the Realm of the Dead or The Land of the Shades. It was certainly not a destination to be desired. To live a long life and to leave behind many descendants (who could keep your memory alive) was a sign of blessing from God and the best equivalent of eternal life.

The military leader of the revolution was Judas “The Hammer” Maccabee. After one very costly battle, he was walking among his fallen troops and noticed that a number of his soldiers died wearing an amulet honoring another God. Going into battle, most of us want all the gods on our side that we can muster, but these young men died without full trust in the God of Israel. And yet they had died for the cause of religious and political freedom. They were not perfect, but they died for a Godly cause. So, Judas took up a collection and made an offering in the Temple that their sin would be forgiven. It was also because of scenes like this, that belief in the Resurrection and a life to come superior to the present one became more common within Judaism, especially among the more progressive groups like the Pharisees. In love and justice, God surely would provide a new life for such valiant young men who died without leaving behind descendants.

Our Catholic belief in prayer for the dead has its roots in this incident from the Book of Maccabees, one of the disputed books of the Hebrew Scriptures that not all Christians accept. Catholics believe that we may experience an intermediate stop on our journey to Heaven, traditionally called Purgatory. For those who die with unfinished business, it is an opportunity to get right with God. Our prayers for the departed may help them on their journey to heaven, just as the saints in heaven help us on our journey. This was a very strong belief in the early centuries of Christianity. Many of the Church Fathers and Mothers believed more strongly in the concept of Purgatory than in Hell. They believed that eventually God would win over everybody. A later theology came to view Purgatory as a place of punishment, a place of fire and torment, making it sound more like the vestibule of hell than the vestibule of heaven. In truth we pray for the dead because our love for others does not end with death. We are all part of the same communion of saints.

Contemporary spiritual writer Ron Rolheiser pictures Purgatory as the Embrace of God. In death, he says, we are embraced by Christ, the Good Shepherd. At that moment we experience how much God loves us and how tawdry some of the choices we made in life really were and how shallow some of our earthly aspirations were. In that moment we see how limited our understanding of love and the love of God has been. God continues to embraces until we are finally ready to let go of everything that separates us from God and truly regret everything that took us away from the love of God.

                                                                                 Fr. Joe