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At this time of year the glorious colours of the dying leaves accompany us through a series of observances connected with death: Halloween, All Saints, All Souls, Remembrance Day.

The ghosts and goblins of Halloween have more commercial than theological interest, and the church discourages dabbling in the occult, fearing that the devil can play nasty tricks on those attempting, through seances, to contact loved ones “on the other side.”

But the medieval church had its own way of maintaining a line of comunication between the living and the dead. By offering masses for the faithful departed, the living could reduce the suffering of the holy souls in purgatory.

The English Reformation put a stop to this practice and, in so doing, weakened a bond which is of value to those suffering bereavement. The Anglican funeral service holds out the hope, in the future, of reunion with our loved ones, but, for the present, there is, between us and them, “a great gulf fixed” (Luke 16:26). In the poignant words of King David after the death of his infant son, “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23).

Most of the world religions teach some form of afterlife, but the conceptions are very different. The Hindu hope for Nirvana seems, to Westerners, at least, to be the negation of the Catholic hope for the Beatific Vision. Jesus’ words to the Sadducees, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30), scarcely cohere with Muslim depictions of paradise.
But reflection on the afterlife, however differently conceived, serves to place our present life in perspective and to help us understand its seriousness and the heavy responsibility it places upon us.

On Remembrance Day we intone the solemn refrain from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional: “Lest we forget—lest we forget!” Forgetfulness has become a characteristic of modern society, and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease is a tragic symptom of this.

I have often lamented the corporate amnesia in our Anglican Church, where our past is no longer something we celebrate but rather something we suppress, in order to forget. Something similar is evident in Canadian society. In schools the emphasis is more on computers than on history. We live in a society where only the present is relevant, because only the present exists.

From the tragedy of Alzheimer’s we know what happens when memory goes: the external appearance of the individual remains, but the personality is no longer there. Something similar happens at the corporate level, whether in the church or in society: the institutions appear to be the same, but, without memory or appreciation of their past, they live out a zombie existence.

The development of the human psyche can only be understood in the context of our personal and collective past. In each of us is written the history of humankind. So our celebration on this Remembrance Sunday is not so much for those who have gone before as it is for us, just as our Lord’s exhortation in the eucharist we are celebrating is also for us: “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).

November 6, 2005

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