Photo Credit Mike Labrum – Unsplash
By Holly Gustafson
Spooky season is upon us, which reminds us that we’ve got two big feast days coming up in the Church: All Saints’ Day on November 1st and All Souls’ Day on November 2nd.
I’ve never had any trouble celebrating All Saints’ Day – when the kids were little, we’d attend All Saints’ Day parties as a family, dressed as our favourite saints. One year my daughter went as St. Lucy, wearing an ethereal white dress and carrying a pair of plastic eyeballs on a plate; my son borrowed a black altar server robe and grabbed his soccer ball, and was miraculously transformed into St. Luigi Scrosoppi, patron saint of soccer players; and one child dressed as St. Patrick while the rest of us cobbled together some pirate costumes and went as the pirates who kidnapped him and dragged him off to Ireland. During the month of November, we’d gather every evening and read stories about the saints; one night during a particularly harrowing part of a novel about Edmund Campion, my youngest daughter slipped me a note that read “Edmund Campion’s head is coming off. I know dat.”
Even now, with a house full of teenage and adult children who’ve outgrown the little saint costumes we had gathered over the years, the saints are still a part of our lives – the kids drink out of the mugs I made each of them, which feature their patron saint on them, and I’ll light a candle on the feast days of the saints who are special to us, when I remember. But we’ve never done November 2nd particularly well.
I haven’t really known how to celebrate the Feast of All Souls as a family, or on my own, for that matter. The idea of Purgatory is still a little mysterious to me, and I haven’t felt much of a connection to it, or to the poor souls who inhabit this place, until I recently spoke with a consecrated woman who made me wonder if I shouldn’t be praying for them a little bit more.
Although she had felt a great call to consecrated life, this woman had also felt drawn to physical motherhood, and she knew that, in accepting her consecrated vocation, she would be giving up the chance to have her own child. And even after thirty years of joyful consecrated life, she still felt a tinge of loss whenever she saw a baby in its mother’s arms, remembering her own offering of motherhood to Christ. But in these moments of loss, instead of wallowing in her own sorrow for what she had given up, she asked Jesus to empty Purgatory, to use her sacrifice, and the pain it sometimes caused her, to release souls into the joy of Heaven. Certainly, I thought, if she can, in her great faith, ask God for the favour of emptying Purgatory, then I can, in my weak faith, offer a prayer or a sacrifice every now and again for souls awaiting Heaven.
There are lots of prayers for the souls in Purgatory, but my favourite comes from St. Gerturde the Great, whose feast day happens to be on November 16th. She was a mystic with a great compassion towards the souls in Purgatory, and this prayer is often attributed to her:
Eternal Father,
I offer You the most precious blood
of thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said
throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners everywhere,
for sinners in the universal Church,
for those in my own home,
and in my family.
Amen
Holly Gustafson lives with her husband, James, and four of their five children, in Regina; they attend Christ the King Parish, where Holly works as the sacrament coordinator. Holly teaches linguistics at First Nations University, and pursues her love of the art of language through public speaking, writing, journaling, and calligraphy. The best advice she ever received was from her spiritual bestie, St. Faustina, who told her that when in doubt, “Always ask Love. It advises best.“
