Month of the Holy Souls – prayer with love

As the year begins to draw towards its close, newspapers and television programs will inevitably look back at famous people who have died during 2026.

This year there will be no shortage of familiar faces: Dolly Parton and Sam Neill; Neale Daniher, and just recently, Sir Patrick Stewart.

We notice the passing of people like these because, without ever knowing them personally, we knew something of them. Their songs accompanied moments of our lives. Their films entertained us. Their voices and faces became familiar.

Yet, it is often not the death of the famous which touches us most deeply.

Sometimes it is the sheer scale of human tragedy. This year we have watched terrible images from overseas: the train disasters in Spain; the devastating floods in Nepal, where more than a thousand people have died and thousands have been reported missing; the lives lost through severe weather events in Peru. These are people whose names we do not know, whose faces will never appear in an end-of-year tribute, but whose lives were precious and whose deaths have left empty places in families and communities.

Recently, I was speaking with an assistant in a local shop and asked whether any of her relatives had been affected by the floods in Nepal. She told me that her relatives were safe. Then she added that she knew people who were missing.

Suddenly Nepal is not so far away.

That is the strange thing about death. A name in a news report can seem distant until there is a human connection. Then the thousands become one person. Someone who was expected home.

And that brings us to November and to the Holy Souls.

Most of the people whom you and I remember during this month were never famous. They may never have had their photograph published beyond the family album. But they were known to us. We loved them. And their absence is still felt.

Some months ago, I attended a funeral in Hobart. At the conclusion, there was a stirring rendition of Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’. The chorus rang out as the coffin was processed: “For you are beautiful. And I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell.”

That is why grief can be so difficult. There are some things the spoken word cannot tell. We discover, after someone has died, how deeply another human life had become woven into our own. We miss the voice on the telephone, the person at the table, the familiar laugh, the little habits that once seemed so ordinary. Sometimes we even miss the things that used to annoy us.

Love leaves an absence when death comes. However, for the Christian, absence is not the same as loss.

At every funeral Mass the Church gives us words of extraordinary hope: “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended.” That is not sentimental consolation. It is the proclamation of Easter. Christ has entered death and has risen. Because he lives, those who die in him live.

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks beautifully of the “great cloud of witnesses” surrounding us (Heb 12:1). Those who have gone before us in faith have not simply disappeared into the past. They belong to the Communion of Saints and we remain united with them in Christ.

And so, November is not simply a month of remembering. It is a month of praying.

We pray for those whose death is recent and still raw, and those who have been gone for decades but whose names can still bring a smile or a tear.

The Book of Wisdom gives us one of the loveliest assurances in all of Scripture: “The souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God.” (Wisdom 3:1)

There can be no safer place.

The famous and the unknown, those whose deaths make headlines and those whose passing is noticed only by a small circle of grieving people: every human life is known to God. Every person is precious in his sight.

During this month of the Holy Souls, may we remember our dead with gratitude. May we pray for them in faith. And when the ache of missing them returns, as it inevitably does, may we entrust them again to the God who loves them even more dearly than the spoken word can tell.

They are in the hands of God.

And because they are in his hands, they are never lost to us.