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Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Becoming Part of the Communion of Saints

I sat and watched as young parents filed into the Heritage Room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Breese for a memorial service for children who had died. Many had lost children through miscarriages or in the first hours of a baby’s birth. The tears flowed in torrents at times and like a gentle rain at others no matter whether the child had died this year or five or more years ago. That’s just a fact of life some parents learn in a very difficult way: the hurt doesn’t go away with the passage of time; that baby is always a part of the family’s life and their thoughts and their prayers.

As we draw near to the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, we remember our friends and relatives who are no longer with us, who are part of the Communion of Saints. Some families increased those numbers of saints when they would rather have kept that child on earth to live a long and productive life.

Our plans don’t include losing our children, but we need to remember we’re all living each day belonging to God, not knowing when we will return to our creator. If we kept that in the front of our minds instead of just an unconscious knowledge buried deep within the brain, maybe we wouldn’t waste so much of our time with hurtful and destructive behaviors. At the very least, we would be spending our time nurturing our families, being more present to our friends and considering how we can build God’s kingdom on earth before we move to the next level, hoping to become members of the Communion of Saints ourselves.

Most young people don’t think about death unless someone close to them dies. Young people believe in their invincibility; dying is not part of their plan or even on their radar. Like a camera lens, we focus up on our mortality when someone young dies. How is this possible? How is it not possible? Every one of us has every day to make a difference, to live life to the very fullest, putting God and God’s people front and center, and so often we just don’t do it. It’s not necessarily a conscious decision to put God and the people second, but it happens. We just lose sight of what is really important, our eternity.

How can we not, especially if we’re young? We have plenty of time to get things right, to make sure we don’t lose our place in the “saints line,” right? Maybe not. That’s what makes life so interesting and challenging, and for parents who lose a child, so hard. Everyone has something in their life that seems so unfair, perhaps even cruel, and we don’t know why this has happened to us or to our family.

Maybe we should be on our (real or proverbial) knees asking God for the grace to accept whatever has happened to us in our lives and stop asking why it has happened to us. We’ll find out when it’s our time to become part of the Communion of Saints.