A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. On one occasion, Jesus said, father, lord of heaven and earth, to you I offer praise. For what you have hidden from the learned and the clever, you have revealed to the merest child. Father, it is true. You have graciously willed it to be so.
Everything has been given over to me by my father. No one knows the son but the father, and no one knows the father but the son and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal him. Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be to you, Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday, we had the great feast of all saints when the church sets aside in a special way to exalt the men and women who have finally achieved their destiny. We only have one, you know, and that is to be with God as his chosen ones forever in heaven.
To be with God is heaven. And we can have something of that on this earth to the extent in which we are conscious of being with God. Today we have what is called the feast of all souls. The first thing that does to me is to irritate me. Because what we're we're not talking about souls.
We are talking about human beings who have lived, who were first of all conceived in this world, who were born in this world, who lived in this world, who died and passed on out of this world, but they remain not souls but human beings, individual human beings. They don't lose their names because they die. This business of talking about souls is just bad philosophy. We are talking about personal immortality. We are talking about life after death for me, and I'm not a soul.
I'm a human being. I'll be changed. We have every reason to believe that. But the change is not going to deprive me of being an individual. It's not going to deprive me of being a human being.
It is not going to change me into an angel. How it all works, I don't know all the details. I'm sure of some of the outstanding facts of the matter, and that's enough for me. As Newman said in his great hymn, lead kindly light. I do not ask to see the distant shore.
One step enough for me. And so as we face up today to the feast of all souls, what do we what are we doing? We are pulling the church together once again. We are thinking in terms of the church of Jesus Christ in its threefold levels of being, of actuality. We yesterday we thought of the church triumphant.
We know fairly well of the church militant. Notice that second prayer there, That all come to me, says our lord, all ye who are burdened and find life wearisome. And don't we all sometimes or other and more or less sometimes or other? And he says, if you take my yoke, you will find it sweet, and my burden, you will find light. That's the church militant.
This is the church in the trenches. This is the church fighting. There is where we are. And then in between, you have what we say the church suffering. The human beings who have had their day in this world, who have lived it for what it is once death happens, as far as change is concerned, and then we are in between.
We are not yet competent. Notice I say competent to appreciate God. We're not pure enough. If you have a mirror and the mirror has lost its quicksilver or whatever you put on the back of it to make mirrors, You can put the most perfect image of anything in front of it. It won't reflect it.
It won't grasp that beautiful reality. It will disfigure it. That's not heaven. And when we live this when we lee leave this life, for the most part, for the most part, we need some purification. We as mirrors of God have to be perfected a bit and sometimes a whole lot.
So that's the whole doctrine of the church about purgatory. It is not a matter of paying a penalty for sin exactly, It's much more preparation so that we can appreciate what God is. Because if heaven is anything, we say it is seeing God face to face. What in the world do we mean when we say see God face to face? You can't see God with these eyes.
What do you mean when you use those words? What does heaven mean to you? Do you think enough about heaven, as I said yesterday? We do not think enough about it. We say is to be with God for all eternity.
Notice, what do you mean by with? Just you can be with a person and not even know them. Think of the number of people you can meet on an elevator. And so we in order for us as perfect images of God reflecting God, in other words, knowing God, we have to be prepared for it. And that preparation requires some care and maybe some suffering, some purification, whatever it is.
And that's today where we are. We are thinking in terms of those of the church, whether we know them, and we know a lot of them. We know our friends, we know our relatives, we know our dear ones who have gone ahead. Some of them we may know only by name. I never I scarcely knew any of my grandparents, only one.
But I'm pretty sure I had some. And so today we think in terms of this great, gorgeous, magnificent church. We are all together. This is the point we should make. I am never alone.
I am never isolated. I am never without an army around me. I belong to the company of Jesus. To the church militant now. To the church triumphant, I hope eventually.
And in between, to the church suffering. And as to that church today, we pay attention and we think of our dear ones as we will during this month of November and pray that they will quickly have that perfection which they will need to know what it is to be with God for all eternity. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.