With All Saints Day, and All Souls Day behind us, we are entering into the end of the liturgical year. Soon the Sunday Gospel readings will focus on eschatology, the end times. It’s our annual confirmation, more specific than Lent and Advent, that this world is passing away.

There is a view that the Church uses evil as a stick, a means of scaring people into belief. This contradictory argument ignores many truths, all of which dovetail with our focus at the end of the year. We know that God is goodness and love itself, having no lack within Him. Does it not make sense, then, with our own knowledge of evil in the world, that there should be some single-point source that contains all evil? It would have to be so, because our understanding of Satan is that he exists with no connection to God; his existence is the complete absence of goodness and love. If there were any presence in the universe worthy of dread and fear, that sounds like a good candidate. But this is just one dimension where the stick argument falls down. What kind of love can be foisted upon an unwilling recipient? Love cannot impose itself; it’s a gift freely given that must meet an equally free acceptance. Evil is real, as we have all experienced, and though we have cause to fear it, it is not enough to run from evil. We must run to love.

With the celebration of All Saints Day, we raise our minds to the stories of those whom the Church has declared their holiness. These are men and women, children and the elderly, who have risen above their human frailties to embrace and live heroic virtue. They were cut down by the sword, died of every disease, or simply expired at the end of their lives; the common thread is that in life and in their death, they perfectly mirrored Christ’s love to the world.

All Souls Day is for the Faithful Departed. This is a special day of prayer for those who died knowing God, but the state of their souls is not known to us. It’s an opportunity for us to pray for them in hope that if they have not yet merited heaven, the grace of our prayer will bring them closer to their final goal.

Life has a way of quickly getting busy, and these regular check-ins are the Chruch’s gentle way of helping us stay focused. Prayer for the deceased should be a regular part of our prayer routine, and we should ever be mindful that Jesus is coming back. Are we prepared?