The premise of All Souls’ Day, however historical it might be, is a big problem for any view that sees the atonement as a completed work under which the believer lives. To oversimplify, All Souls’ Day is based in part on the belief that the souls of the faithful departed must continue to pay for their sins before seeing God. While many Christians would say it is good to remember the faithful departed, theologians would differ on exactly what happens to the soul at death.
That being said, Western Christianity’s great-granddaddy, Augustine of Hippo, did not have a problem with prayers for, or to, or even from, the dead. Here is some proof from Taylor Marshall:
“There is an ecclesiastical discipline, as the faithful know, when the names of the martyrs are read aloud in that place at the altar of God, where prayer is not offered for them. Prayer, however, is offered for the dead who are remembered.” — Augustine, in Sermon 159
“Neither are the souls of the pious dead separated from the Church which even now is the kingdom of Christ. Otherwise there would be no remembrance of them at the altar of God in the communication of the Body of Christ.” — Augustine, The City of God
“A Christian people celebrates together in religious solemnity the memorials of the martyrs, both to encourage their being imitated and so that it can share in their merits and be aided by their prayers.” — Augustine, Against Faustus
Are the departed really there? An unseen thing must be imagined before it can be believed. Any meaningful grasp of even a biblical passage engages the imagination, but not everything imagined is worth believing, and imagination doesn’t indicate reality. I often wonder what things in the Christian tradition have been simply, merely, imagined. Did our ancestors sense real presences, or were their brains reliving fragments of memories?
Still, the value I found and assembled in the Episcopal Church and in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and in C.S. Lewis’s speculations on the numinous was just a sense, just a feeling, that the liturgical service, Holy Communion, and in some symbolic way, even the candles and polished gold crosses marked intersections of the temporal and the eternal, and that through repetition of certain acts, worshipers remembered the eternal, fixed point to which we and our departed brothers and sisters belong. Inside the sanctuary, as a candle holds a steady flame, in a moment of solemn reflection, the Kingdom of God, past, present, and future, briefly visits, while outside human events carry on.
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