Dear friends,
It’s Thursday morning as I write this newsletter, but the memory of Monday’s All Souls’ requiem is still running through my mind. As I wrote in my memorial letter, Fauré is an old favorite, but I’ve never heard it sung more beautifully or better aligned with what was happening at the altar. Thank you to everyone who had a hand in offering that liturgy, and especially to our musicians and wonderful soloists!
We offer beautiful things to God because God is a worthy recipient of our best work. It’s also, I hope, deeply rewarding in itself, to make something together of surpassing worth. All Souls’ is especially rewarding because we offer it to God for the repose of the dead - who cannot give us anything in return; they cannot return our affection, asleep as they are in the Lord. In offering a requiem for them, we bring to the altar our own grief, our pain at love’s leaving off. We ask nothing for ourselves, only that God would grant that their rest be peaceful. But God’s response is to give us his Son, in Bread and Wine - in whom we enjoy unbroken communion with all who rest in him.
A requiem, then, is not a lonely cry of grief into the void, but a pas des deux with God, in whom all our loves coinhere. It is a way of requiting the unrequitable, of bridging the gap, of letting love continue to speak despite the closure of all other lines of communication.
I think this must be part of what we experience as so moving about the All Souls’ Requiem: not only are our loves affirmed here in church, but there is some satisfaction too. In the act of making an offering on behalf of those we love but see no longer, we receive the gift of love’s continuation: mysteriously, by grace, and yet as surely as the sun rises.
It was a great privilege to keep this feast with you Monday night, and to pray for our beloved dead. Continue to keep them close in the days and months ahead. Let your love for them show you the way to the altar of God, and let the altar of God be the place where lonely and grieving hearts begin to be stitched back together.
Yours faithfully,
Fr. Sawicky
