The feast of All Souls on Nov. 2 kicks off a month the Catholic Church dedicates to prayer for the faithful departed — and invites us to treat this time as a kind of memento mori for ourselves as well.
Our culture does not like to focus on death. Lacking a substantively real faith in God, the modern world vacillates between a nihilistic atheism that views death as annihilation and a vague spiritualism that affirms the possibility of life after death but leaves it so vaporously thin that it scarcely can bear any great hope. It also creates no real connection between the next life and this one, beyond a few sentimental notions of being “rewarded” somehow in the next life for being a “good person” in the here and now.
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