A Homily for the Solemnity of All Souls
Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9   Romans 6:3-9   John 6:37-40

Have you written your obituary? Or do you plan to leave the task to your loved ones? Most of us cannot expect to have our lives assigned to journalists like Sam Roberts, a long-time obit writer for The New York Times. 

And those who will be written up by professionals will have little say in the matter. First, they will be dead. Second, as Mr. Roberts explains in his new book Are They Dead Yet: The Art of the Obit (2026), libel laws apply only to the living. If you are noteworthy, someone else will be free to summarize your life when you are gone.

That greatly bothered Alfred Nobel. We associate his name with the most prestigious of international prizes, but the Swedish chemist made his fortune through the invention of dynamite. When his older brother Ludwig died in 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly conflated the siblings, and Alfred’s conscience was pricked when he read himself described as a merchant of death. It bothered the industrialist that he would be remembered for bringing so much destruction into the world.

So Nobel devoted the last eight years of his life to charitable causes. Given the chance to rewrite history, he took it. Hence his name on those humanitarian honors. 

What’s the meaning of history? Not history in general. No, the lives we live as calendars and clocks move relentlessly forward. 

It is how we return to God, our creator and our conclusion. Consider the contrast our faith draws between us and God—because what we confess of God helps us to comprehend ourselves.

We say that God dwells in eternity. That is not simply an incredibly long stretch of time. It is life outside of time, outside of our coming and ceasing to be. There is no waxing and waning of fullness in God, as in us. As hard as it is to understand, God is a dynamic fullness that never diminishes.

In contrast, we change every day of our lives, though, like nature around us, too slowly to see in a glance. You probably did not notice the day your knees began to go bad. You only know them as they are now, as you hope they will not continue to deteriorate. 

The good news is that while we decline physically, to the extent that our bodies allow, our minds, our souls grow stronger. We continue to learn. As odd as it sounds, we become more human. We expand; we deepen. Again, so slowly it is hard to see, unless you think back upon yourself, say, at age 12.

The great question is our movement from time to eternity. If God, from the moment we came into existence, intended for us to share divine life, what does it mean for creatures like us to move into, to dwell in God? How does the partial, the ever-growing, come to rest in absolute fullness? How does that happen?

That is the real meaning of purgation after death. If we are like Alfred Nobel—and in this sense we are all like Alfred Nobel—we want our lives to finish well, to be something good, complete and whole. God does not carry fractions of human lives into eternity. That means that if we have left life in a broken or unhealed, in an incomplete state, then God in his mercy and goodness will make us whole.

Christians who balk at purgatory refuse to consider the distance between our lives on earth and those of eternity. The partial must be brought to completion, the fractured made whole. And who else is going to do this when our time on earth is through other than the God who created us?

The real reluctance to accept purgatory, a teaching every bit as ancient as the church herself, is the willingness to allow the church, the community of faith, to play a role in what comes after death. Yet the Scriptures constantly tell us to pray for one another so that we may come into the fullness God intended. And they never say that such prayers should cease at death. Indeed, to the contrary, they insist that no good part of life, certainly not prayer, fails to enter the life to come.

Most of us will not write our obituaries. We will not be the ones who put the final spin on the story. And that is O.K., because in the book of life, the only text that matters, we can trust God and the prayers of the church to finish the tale, to give it the ending it always deserved.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.