Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the commemoration of all the faithful departed, the Feast of All Souls.

The Opening Prayer Heavenly Father, your gift of life is given to each of us. Be brought before you in fullness. Your mercy encourages us, your justice calls us to the truth, but trust brings us to peace. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. A reading from the Old Testament from the Book of Wisdom, third chapter, first to the ninth verse. The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.

They seemed in the view of the foolish, to be dead, and their passing away was thought an affliction, and their going forth from us utter destruction. But they are in peace. For if before men indeed they be punished, yet is their hope full of immortality, chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself. In the time of their visitation they shall shine, and they shall dart about as sparks through stubble. They shall judge nations and rule over peoples, as the Lord shall be their king forever.

Those who trust in him shall understand truth, and the faithful shall abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are with his holy ones, and his care is with his elect. The Word of the Lord. The Lord is my shepherd. There is nothing I shall want. A reading from the New Testament. From Paul’s letter to the Romans, fifth chapter.

Fifth through the eleventh verse. Brothers and sisters, hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For Christ while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more then, since we are now Justified by His blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath?

Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, how much more, once reconciled, would be saved by his life? Not only that, but we boast of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. The word of the Lord, the Gospel for this feast of all souls is taken from St. John 6:37, 40th verse. Jesus said to the crowds, everything that the Father gives me will come to me. I will not reject anyone who comes to me because I came down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of the One who sent me.

And this is the will of the One who sent me, that I should not lose anything of what he gave me, but that I should raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. And I shall raise them on the last day. The Gospel of the Lord Today’s celebration, as well as yesterday’s celebration, the Feast of All Saints, draws our attention to one of the most basic teachings we have in our church about life. And that is that it never ends, it continues. When we die, we simply enter into another way of existence and we never cease to exist.

I’m always amazed when I spend time with people, especially younger people. They might say to me, you know, I don’t believe in life after death, or I don’t really believe that this life has any meaning. And they can be so confident in that statement because there’s nobody really holding them accountable for believing this or not in the sense of holding a gun to their head. And there’s nothing really that changes your life. If you, you know, on the surface you say, okay, I believe that this is all there is, or I believe I’m going to continue afterwards. I think it’s more of a major issue when you’re about to die.

But nevertheless, it’s not difficult for a human being to simply say, I don’t believe it because I don’t understand it. So it probably doesn’t exist. That’s where faith comes in. And faith has the most interesting requirement, and that is a good healthy imagination. Faith is believing in things that you can’t see, can’t really prove, can’t really even understand. So many paradoxes in the things that we’re called to trust in and believe in, that they seem so self contradictory that it would be easy to say, it’s easier to write it off than to ponder it and try to figure it out.

But we’ve never been really asked to figure out God’s plan, but to rather allow it, surrender to it, accept it. I choose to accept it. I choose, as a believer, to say I believe because not only am I taught this, but I feel it deep inside of me. I believe that I will exist forever. And I think the majority of people agree with that. All right.

To believe that you’re going to exist forever is one thing, but then what happens to you when you leave this body, this world, this place where we are told that we’re somewhat limited in terms of the fullness of who we will eventually be? What happens to us? Well, these two feasts, the Feast of All Saints and All Souls, is a very interesting reminder that we believe. Many of us believe that there is both this promise that when you die, you’ve lived a good life and you enter into heaven, you’ve been purified by this life. I like to think of it. You became fully yourself, you’ve done the work, and you enter into this relationship with God and with all those who’ve gone before you.

It’s a kind of homecoming. And there we exist forever. It’s funny, when I think about existing forever, it kind of, you know, short circuits in my imagination because I said, I don’t know if I want to do this forever, you know, but that’s what we’re taught. That’s what we have to imagine. What would it be like to live forever? It wouldn’t be that.

We say, all right, now, this is day 75 billion 400 that I’ve. Or 400 million blah, blah, blah, that I’ve lived. No, it’s just that there will be no time. We won’t think about time like we do here. That’s what forever means. Won’t seem like forever.

It’ll just seem like this present moment right now. But then there’s also the All Souls Day, which focuses on the fact that there is the possibility of not growing in this life, not becoming all that you are called to be. And somehow you find that you need to continue to work. You need to continue to be purified, to grow. And so our tradition, you know, many Christian traditions believe in a place called purgatory. And purgatory is tricky because it has so many strange ideas surrounding it.

One of the ones that I was taught as a child always frightened me. And that is, no matter how many sins, God forgave. No matter how many sins God forgave sins that I committed, I have to pay for every single one of those in purgatory. And I was told that purgatory was sort of like a mini hell, or at least a temporary hell. And hell was a place of being burned and terrible pain. So I thought to myself, this is really, really difficult because how do I believe in a loving God when I realize that he is so prone to punishing?

Even when he’s forgiven me, he has to punish me. And so I know there’s something. Something not right about that. Something doesn’t feel good about that. How can a loving God, even though he forgives me, want me to suffer? So suffering in and of itself as a payment for something I did doesn’t make sense.

But if the suffering is growing and changing in the areas that I didn’t grow and change in here on this plane, then I can believe that. I can really believe that that makes sense. I need to grow. I need to grow and become. And if I don’t do it here, God says, it’s all right. You can do it afterwards in this strange place called purgatory.

So the scriptures that we have for this celebration are filled with hope. And the one that I love is the gospel, because it says so clearly, look, I came into the world to do something, and I am going to do it. I’m going to accomplish it. It’s my task to do this, and I am going to save everyone. And I have the power of God. I am God.

What an amazing statement. And he says, I will not fail in this. Does that mean that we are all forced to be saved? No, it means that he has within himself the power to free you and free me from anything that would keep me from the fullness of life. The only thing that can keep God from being able to achieve that is my free will, saying, I don’t want it. I don’t want it.

I don’t want any part of it. He gives you that freedom. And I have a hard time imagining someone choosing it, but perhaps they do. It’s possible. But I believe that if you. And if I decide that we want everything that God longs to offer us and we surrender and allow his salvation to work inside of us, it’s going to call us to growth and transformation.

And what we don’t accomplish here, we’ll accomplish there in purgatory. Now, what’s purgatory like? Well, I don’t think it’s burning. I don’t think there’s any value in screaming and wailing to God over physical pain. I don’t see that as Anything that God would say, that’s wonderful, that’s good, they deserve it. No, I think it would be something more like the painful facing of all the stuff we would not face here on this planet.

And then we would have to work through the process of grieving, of reconciling ourselves with ourselves. And most especially, it seems that the greatest failures that I’m afraid I will see after I die, because I can’t see them fully now, my mistakes is the things that I’ve done to damage other people. And I always think that somehow purgatory is going to be that painful place where we see what we have done or not done to those that we love. And what would be the most interesting way for that to unfold. Certainly it seems in purgatory there would be the requirement of having to face it, swallow hard, forgive ourselves as God forgives us. But it would seem also that this would be a perfect time where, since I believe so deeply and so powerfully in a thing called the communion of saints, which means that we can call upon those who have died to intercede for us.

Wouldn’t it seem perfectly clear that those people who have died, who have somehow been unable to be what we needed them to be, wouldn’t it seem if they do have power to influence us from the place where they are, wouldn’t they want to heal and make up for what they did to us? Wouldn’t they be, if nothing, us other than a constant prayer to God to beg him to make up for what they couldn’t do? And that they would be our greatest advocates for salvation, transformation. I love that thought. The dead who are struggling to grow, who have failed us in some way, intercede for us and pray for us to God that they might be instruments of helping us to receive what they weren’t able to give us when they were on this earth. Also, we have a long tradition in the church of praying for the dead.

And so we also have an obligation to pray for them in their process of growth and change. And maybe we could say that those who have died, who haven’t grown, and we’re still here, we would say, well, you know, there’s lots that I didn’t do for someone. I could have been more of a better father, a better mother, a better brother, a better friend. And so I want to pray for them that if there was something that I was here to do that I didn’t do that would have helped them achieve the growth they were needing to achieve, I would do anything now to help them. So we Have a wonderful tradition in the church of praying for the dead. You don’t pray for someone who is in eternal damnation, if that’s possible, that someone be there.

And you don’t pray for somebody who’s in heaven because they’re already there. So why would there be so much of a long tradition of praying for the dead other than. Yes, they’re still going through something that’s like our life here on Earth. Different. We have so much more connection with our essence after we die. I think it’s one of the hardest things about living on this planet is that we see so little of what is real, what is true.

We have this unconscious part of us that absorbs information like a sponge. It takes everything in. It’s inside of us. But our conscious life is sometimes so small and narrow. I believe that small, narrow way of being is destroyed when we transformed, when we enter into death. And there’s a kind of new birth to a new awareness and a new life.

And then to see everything. Oh, gosh, to see everything as it really is, as it was when we were here on this earth, that would be an amazing, amazing experience. And how loving of God, how marvelous of his plan that, yes, we all have this. This challenge to grow and to become. In order to enter into the fullness we call it, we need to be purified, you know, freed of all this stuff that encumbers us. The burdensomeness that we get caught up in the illusions, the lies, get rid of all those, so we can be pure and truly the essence of who we are as we return to the one who created us.

I would think purgatory would be a very happy place. Happy in the sense that maybe a recovery ward in a hospital could be happy, at least for those watching or whatever. Even if you get well enough to know I have crossed a major threshold and I can feel the healing being poured into me. That would be a wonderful, wonderful way to exist. So what is all of this leading to? What am I asking you to imagine with me?

Well, it’s twofold. I don’t necessarily think that you need to believe in the way that I believe about the connection that we have with the dead. I believe it with all my heart. Many, many people believe it. There are too many experiences of people who have experienced a person who has died, and they can feel their presence. They can sometimes see them, they hear them, give them intuitions.

I mean, it just seems too much of an experience that is too common among people to be written off as, oh, well, that’s Just some memory coming back. How many times have I heard a. A homily at a funeral that says something like, you know, well, we have our memories of our loved one and one day when we die, we’ll reconnect. What if there isn’t any real disconnect? What if the connection stays forever? It seems like if there’s one thing that we talk about when we talk about eternal life, it’s not just our existence that continues, but so much of who we are is our relationship.

So much. Let’s imagine that we never lose our relationships. And there’s so many people who have had near death experiences that go there and the first thing they sense is the relationships are there and we connect with them again. So if it is about eternal connections, then it would make sense that they would never be separated even in a place where one is continuing to go through transformation. So there’s lots of reasons to, to see the logic of why I believe the way I believe. But the thing that is really core to what I’m saying, that is a core thing in Christianity and that is that God is the God who saves.

God is the God who is generous. God is the God who’s going to do everything he can to keep his promise. And his promise is, I will create you and I will save you, and I will die for you, and I will make up for you any sin that you ever committed so that you can be with me. Injustice. It makes sense that that isn’t something that just is a magic wand that clears everything and we just get off the hook and we don’t have to struggle or grow. No, I really believe that we’re here to grow and to change.

And I don’t think there’s anything more painful than being faced with your illusions and half truths and have to face. In fact, that’s one of the great things about aging and spending time reflecting on your life. You can look at it and say, oh my God, I can’t believe I was that unconscious or that naive or that selfish. And I believe those moments are very, very crucial in the purification process that we’re here to accomplish. So if it makes sense to you, if it makes sense that this process is real, then imagine it in some way that brings you a sense of you are in the process, you are in the work, you are in this vortex of life that is saying, we’re here to change, we’re here to grow. We’re not here to wallow in the past or be afraid of the future.

We’re here to Spend this moment here now with open minds, open hearts. Tell me God, who I am. Tell me God, who you are. Tell me what this is all about. What a great prayer. What a great thing that God would like to hear from all of us.

And it’s so courageous to say that to God. I just want to see the truth. And that connection means there’s something about being in the truth which is beyond our understanding, beyond something we can comprehend, trusting that the truth that is coming to us from a power beyond ourselves is trustworthy. If I’m going to demand that I understand and can fathom and can figure out everything that is true and therefore I understand it and I’ll accept it, it’s a dead end street. You can’t do that. So the ideal way to be a part of this wonderful, peaceful life that God has asked you and me to live on this planet is to trust in this plan and to awaken ourselves to to what it basically involves.

And I don’t presume to say I know what I ever try to describe in a homily is the essence of that, but I just know there’s one fundamental truth. God is good, God is love, and God saves you and me. Sam Satan Sam Closing Prayer Father, we trust in your word and we believe in your power. So take away from us any unnecessary or destructive fear of the future. Help us to know that we are in your hands and that your love and your patience and your fidelity are the things that we long to trust in, to believe in, and to be comforted with each day of our lives. And we ask this in Jesus name.

Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program, is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast, Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support.

Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.