Welcome back to the Universalist podcast. I am Martin Koheinsky, the creator of Universalist,
and in this episode I'll be looking at the highlights of the week ahead, starting with
Sunday the 2nd of November. This year, the weeks are divided perfectly. As I am recording
this, all saints lies just ahead, thus the week is about to go out with a bang and a
dazzling blaze of glory. By the time you listen to this, the new week will have begun
with the Sunday which is a shadow of that magnificent feast. Sunday the 2nd of November
is the commemoration of the faithful departed, all souls.
Everything that all saints is, all souls isn't. All saints is brilliant, all souls is dim.
Not dark, but dim. All saints we pray to, all souls we pray for. We aren't mourning,
really, but there's still a certain sense of obligatory melancholy about all souls,
and by extension the whole of November, the month of the dead. There is no rational justification
for that, why be sad over souls who are on the way to glory, their salvation assured,
but somehow the gloom is there all the same. It's time we remembered our theology and felt
it with our hearts, instead of simply knowing it with our minds.
Let me quickly get an administrative point out of the way.
If you are in England, Wales or Scotland, all saints is never celebrated on a Saturday
because in a good Protestant country, Saturdays are not for churchy things. So we delay all
saints to the Sunday to conform to the culture, just as our fellow Christians in Southern
Arabia often find themselves celebrating their Sunday Masses on Friday to fit in. This also
means that in England, Wales and Scotland, all souls this year is put off until Monday
the 3rd when no one will notice it. Having said all this, I'm going to ignore it, but
I didn't want listeners from Great Britain to get bewildered when they go to Mass on
Sunday and all souls aren't even mentioned. Now back to the story.
Christianity is Judaism completed and fulfilled, and Judaism works like this. First, we get
into the habit of doing something, then we become conscious that we are doing it and
finally we stop and think about why we are doing it and what it means.
The key passage in the Old Testament actually forms one of the available readings for all
souls day. It comes near the end of the second book of Maccabees, which is the last historical
book of the Old Testament. We are in the late 160s BC. Judas Maccabeus has been fighting
of War of Liberation against the Seleucid Kings. A battle has been won. The day after
the battle, the Sabbath was celebrated. The day after that, it is high time to gather
up the fallen and lay them to rest with their ancestors. As they do so, the people discover
that the fallen warriors have all been wearing, under their clothes, amulets from pagan shrines
to bring them luck. This secret apostasy, though if you are a fighter you might call
it insurance, not rejecting God, just hedging your bets, must be why these particular men
died. The people praise the Lord who brings hidden facts to light. They pray that this
sin should be blotted out. Judas even takes up a collection of 2,000 drachmas from everyone
and sends it to Jerusalem to have a sacrifice for sin offered for the fallen men.
Now the editor of the book jumps in. Having told us what happened, he tells us what it
means. Judas, by his actions, was taking account of the resurrection. If the dead were not
going to rise again, there would have been no point in praying for them to be released
from their sin or in offering sacrifices to that end.
After more than a thousand years of careful theological thinking, where we got to by the
end of the 13th century was this. At death we are all of us destined for heaven or hell
whichever it is that we truly want. Either an eternity of bliss in our risen bodies,
in love and in the presence of God and of each other, or an eternity with ourselves,
with whatever it is that we like better than anything else, better than God in heaven.
Either way, the choice is ours and we get what we want. The choice is crystallised at
the moment of death. That moment we get definitively what we want. Not what we want to want, or
ought to want, or would like to see ourselves wanting, but what deep down we do want following
our deepest will. That will is, if you like, who we have become in the course of our lives.
So death separates the time of "I am becoming who I will be" from the time of "I am who
I have become." To this choice, no amount of prayer or sin offering by our friends can
make any difference at all. But let us suppose that at the moment of death the deepest me
is truly turned towards God and life and light. Then that is that as far as that's concerned,
I get what I want. But there is a barrier, you might say, between myself and my real
me. A barrier made of accumulated vices and bad habits. That encrustation gets in the
way. It needs to be cleaned off me until I am truly myself and nothing but myself. Only
then am I ready for heaven and ready to know as I am known. The will has shown itself to
be healthy, but the whole person still has to be made whole. God being omnipotent could
in some sense magically scrub the whole thing away in an instant, except that he can't
do that and still be God. God operates through the laws of nature, not by abolishing them.
God does not cheat. So here is where our prayers of the dead come
in. We pray for the dead, not to change the destination they have chosen, but to help
them get themselves ready to arrive there. Look at the Maccabees again. The fallen Jewish
fighters were already saved, because they had given their lives for their people and
for the Lord. But they were carrying the burden of an attachment to what is not God, wearing
the amulets of idols just in case, and that attachment had to be got rid of. It was not
really them, and it was in their way. That is what their prayer and sacrifice were all
about. There is another reason for praying for the
dead when they are people we have known. In that prayer we are praying for the growth
and purification of our continuing relationship with them. I said we are praying for them,
but we are also praying for us and them, a living us too, which was born when we first
got to know each other, which at the end of time will see us reunited in eternity, but
with just as the moment has to straddle, rather awkwardly, the walls of death, one leg on
each side. You and I, being on the living side of those walls, are the ones who have
to keep the relationship growing and advancing, and the principle way we do this is by prayer.
We don't have nearly enough experience of death nowadays. A hundred years ago we would
all have known someone who had lost a brother or sister or parent in childhood. Two hundred
years ago we would probably have been in that situation ourselves. Today both of these are
unlikely. The culture of the age which loves to oversimplify takes the opportunity to deny
death altogether, until every death that does happen, because each of us, despite all the
advances of medicine, is a hundred percent likely to die eventually, every death that
does happen is unnatural, outrageous, tragic, and probably somebody's fault.
Whether you have had an encounter with death or not, let's walk through an imaginary
bereavement to get a picture of what I mean by the developing relationship we have with
the dead. For the sake of being specific, let's say that you are losing your father
and that he's been ill for a while and become a bit of a burden to himself and to others.
At the moment of death, if you are lucky enough to be there, you will see almost certainly
why Jesus on the cross did not say it is finished, ended, interrupted, but it is completed, it
is accomplished. What happens at that moment is enormous. It is too big for you to cope
with. Before you can come properly to terms with it, you will find yourself broken in
pieces and put back together again. But it is not wrong. It is not outrageous. It is
not unnatural. It just is. For a while you will go blundering about the place as if the
back of your mind has been blown off, because it has. You will still cope with whatever
you focus on, exactly intentionally and now, but all the background things are a different
story. You will lock yourself out of your house. You will lose your keys. You will go
to town to get things for the funeral, having left your wallet behind, and then, having
got cash from a sympathetic bank teller, leave that behind in the first shop you go
to. Your temperament will become uncertain, and you will surprise yourself by flying
off the handle at the smallest thing. It is ridiculous and embarrassing, but it has no
real importance and it doesn't last. This aspect of bereavement isn't what I am meaning
to talk about. What I am talking about is your continuing
relationship, which has not been cut short by death. It has only been transposed to
a different key. It will start with a time of purgation. When you dream the illness and
nothing but the illness, and you wake up in the middle of the night with a start and say
out loud, "Thank God he's dead!" There is no blasphemy here. It is absolute truth and
absolute thanks. God has tried you as far as you could go, but he has not tried you further
than that. That is why you are thanking him. As time goes on, in your thoughts and in your
dreams your father will no longer be ill. Because that illness was never him, it wasn't
even part of him, it was only a fact about him, a bit of stuff loosely attached to him,
and it has slipped away, leaving behind the reality. Other facts about will slip away
too. Your father may stop being old, not in the sense of being actually young, but in
the sense that age itself ends up as yet another fact about, that can slide off leaving the
real person free. I should add that the whole age race has a tinge of humour to it. All
through your life you thought you were condemned to be always, say, 26 years younger than your
father, always and exactly the same, but now you find the gap shortening. Next year you
are only 25 years apart, the year after, only 24, and so it goes on and you begin to wonder,
"Will I catch up with him?" and quite possibly you will.
There is more. When you are at an age which you remember your father having been at, you
find yourself understanding him far better than you ever did when he actually was that
age. The realisation may make you feel embarrassed or apologetic, or you may realise for the
first time his greatness in terms of the problems you know now that he faced, and you will wonder
how you can ever live up to him. In prayer for him, and in sharing the presence of God
with him, you will receive forgiveness and reconciliation.
Every relationship is different. I have a friend who hated his father for 50 years, and
now he's dead, he continues to hate him. I find that unimaginable, but there we are.
I have spent a lot of time on ourselves as individuals, and our relationship with our
own dead as individuals. It may ring a bell for you or it may not, but I do think this
is the right direction to start from. To pray for the dead is meritorious, and especially
for what used to be called the lost souls in purgatory, that people have no one left
to pray for them. But if you start from 'the dead', just 'the dead', with no other
facts about them, then you are not praying for people only in abstraction.
It is like praying for the poor. The poor are not human. Human beings are tall or short.
They have eyes or hair of this colour or that colour. They have likes, dislikes, hopes,
ambitions, worries, all those things. To strip someone of all those human qualities
and to label that person purely in terms of economic status is to dehumanise him.
The proper, the only way to approach loving the poor is to love a specific poor person
first, or a specific poor family, to enter into their likes, dislikes, hopes, ambitions,
worries and all that, until they become your own. Then you can project, by analogy, your
love of this or that poor person onto the world of poor people in general. You won't
know who those people are. You won't know what the specific facts about them are, but
you will be aware that they have facts, that they are people, that they are who and not
just what. As with the poor, so with the dead. The dead people you know, and continue in
a relationship with, will guide you and teach you how to pray for the dead people you do
not know, but who still are people for all that. For this reason, all souls by itself
is not enough. It is only a summary of our encounter with the dead. The dead people we
do keep in touch with are signposts who will guide us and point us towards the wider reality.
Unless you are a spiritual athlete, you need the specific to point you towards the general.
It is therefore a very good exercise to keep track of the anniversaries of the dead people
in your lives. When they die, we virtuously think that we are going to do just that. We
think we are going to, but more often than not, we don't. I was going to give you an
example of a very dear friend of mine who died quite recently, just the other year. Only
the other year, and I was going to make you laugh by telling you that when I looked it
up, I found that only the other year was really 2016. Except that I really did look it up,
and 2016 turned out to be actually 2014, which makes me look even more foolish, but it shows
how time slips past you when you aren't looking. In these podcasts, I keep to a general resolution
of not discriminating between different flavours of universalis, the iPhone and iPad apps
versus the Android apps or the Mac and Windows programs as against them. If one has a feature
that the others don't, I avoid confusion by not mentioning it. Today is the exception.
I am going to talk about a feature which is in the universalis apps for the iPhone and
iPad and nowhere else. The reasons are technical and I may go into them in the episode notes
for this podcast. If you use Android, don't go away. Carry on listening, because this
won't take long. As you know, tapping in the middle of the
screen in the universalis app makes the toolbar appear, and in the toolbar there's a little
information button just to the left of the centre, and if you tap that button you get
a menu. In that menu, there is a command called Remembrance Cards. The idea of a Remembrance
Card is this. It is just like a card you might create for a contacts app, but it is for your
deceased friends and relations. All you need to put into it is the name and date of death,
but you can put more if you want and you know it, the date of birth, a short note, an obituary,
even a picture. Suppose that one of your friends died on 27th October 2019, then every year
in the About Today page on the 27th of October, that friend's name will appear at the top
of the page, and if you have managed to give any extra information, there will be an article
about that friend, lower down on the About Today page below any pictures and stories
of the day's saints. As a bonus, on Saturdays and Sundays you will be told about all the
anniversaries of the coming week. It sounds very little, it sounds simple, it is simple,
but it really does do good. It keeps you in touch with the people you love, honour and
forget, and it keeps the relationship going with them, going and growing.
Now I'd like to recommend a book for November, the Month of the Dead. I like to tell the
story of how Universalists started, you've probably heard it before. I fell into the
Downside Abbey Bookshop on Easter morning, drunk on the spirit after having just celebrated
the resurrection twice over, and I saw a secondhand breivery and stopped being afraid of it for
once and bought it, and that was the beginning of it all. Here is another Downside Abbey
Bookshop story.
My headmaster, when I was at Downside, was Dom Elwood Watkin. He was, we discovered much
later, a high-caliber intellectual. He had been elected a fellow of the Royal Historical
Society while he was still an undergraduate, and to this were later added fellowship of
the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society of Arts. That was not one noticed when
one was in the school under him. One respected him, that was all. The young are good at seeing
below the surface without even realising they are doing it, and here was a man. Not as sometimes
happens to schoolteachers a performance masquerading as some kind of a man. Friends of mine have
testified that one could practically get into stand-up fights with him, and that stern disciplinarian
though he was, he could put himself in one's shoes and see things through one's eyes.
The respect, in other words, went both ways.
I am tempted to claim that this is common among monks who, having spent their lives living
in a community with all its ups and downs, see the school as just another community most
of whose members happen to be junior and temporary. It is the healthiest possible environment
and the only real way to run a boarding school. But although the Dom L. Red Kind of Monk
is frequent, he is not universal.
In 1999 or so, after I had started Universalis, it was Easter again that I was in the Abbey
Bookshop again, and there was a pile of copies of a book by Dom L. Red Watkin called Resurrection
Is Now. I call it a book, but it was not published, just privately printed by permission of the
right reverend the abbot of Downside, and it was a lot of type sheets of paper optimistically
held together by a spine of black tape. My copy is falling to bits by now.
I bought the book not because of the subject, but because of the man, but I got around to
reading it eventually and it was providential. I was bowled over by it. I knew that Dom
L. Red was a master craftsman of the English language, who could understand and explain
well and explain so well because he understood, but I hadn't seen his powers exercised on
the scale of a book before.
Resurrection Is Now is a book about death and about resurrection, about the reality of
death and the reality of the salvation of God. I asked, and the abbot of Downside gave
me permission to reproduce the book in Universalis, and you can find Resurrection Is Now as
one of the books in the daily books feature in the Universalis apps and programmes.
I have had enough technicalities already in this podcast, but for daily books, look in
the information menu on mobile devices or the file menu in computers and take it from
there. The episode notes have more details. As a daily book, Resurrection Is Now is divided
into 30 instalments for you to read daily, which fits November rather nicely.
As soon as I put Resurrection Is Now into Universalis, I had a flood of emails from
people asking me where they could get the book. The Abbey Bookshop managed to find a few copies
hiding in corners here and there, but after that, the book was as out of print as an out-of-print
book can possibly be. It was all very frustrating.
This year, I have thought of something I can do to honour Dom Elrid further, because we
all owe him so much, and to honour his book. There are people who like reading on the screen,
but there are also people who hate it. About you, the listeners to this podcast, I know
that you like to listen. So, however you are listening, through the web or through apps,
at home or in the car, in the same channel that you get the podcasts, you will get each
Monday and Wednesday in November, an instalment of Resurrection Is Now read out to you. Eight
instalments in all through the month, coming to you regularly just like the podcast episodes.
To encourage you to try it, let me list the chapters. Death as the end, including the
death of experience, the death of love, the death of the world, the death of others, and
of course our own death. Death as the beginning, including resurrection
as we see it in nature, and the end of isolation. A pair of chapters, by a man came death, and
by a man came the resurrection of the dead. Then the moment of choice, covering judgment,
purgatory, hell, the resurrection of the body, and heaven. And finally, there is preparation
for death, including the sacraments of confirmation, the Eucharist, confession, and the sacrament
of the sick, and prayer. Resurrection is now is not a heavy treatise. In many ways it is
more poetic than anything. Certainly, it has no air of superiority. It is the work of a
learned man, yes, but a simple one too. Here is what, towards the end of his life, Dom
L. read used to say to his friends, "I do not fear death, but it is such a break from
established habits." That's all for this week. If you'd like to write to us about anything,
send an email to
[email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you. Have
a good week in every sense, and let's pray for one another.
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