September Community Monthly Memorial of the Dead

Night Office Readings:
2nd September 2015, Monthly Memorial, 
Night Office

Second Reading

A Reading about the Resurrection of the Dead

(From a Sermon by St. Augustine.)

If you take away faith in the resurrection of the dead, all Christian teaching falls to the ground. But even should our faith be founded on the resurrection of the dead, the Christian soul is not then secure, unless we distinguish between the life that is to come and that which passes away.

But you are sorrowful because of your dear one who is buried; because you do not now hear his voice. He lived; he died. He ate, he does not now eat. He felt and saw; now he feels nothing. The joys and pleasures of the living are now nothing to him.

But, do you mourn for the seed when you plough the earth? Let us suppose there was someone so ignorant of things, that when he bore the seed to the fie1d and cast it upon the earth and buried it in the broken soil; suppose there was someone so ignorant of the way of nature, even of things close at hand, that, thinking of the departed summer, he mourns for the wheat, saying to himself: 'This wheat, now buried in the earth, with what toil was it harvested, and carried from the field, threshed upon the harvest floor, winnowed, stored in the barn! We saw its beauty, and rejoiced and gave thanks. Now it is taken from our eyes. I see the ploughed 1 and; but the wheat I see neither here nor in the barn!” Sorrowfully he would mourn the wheat as dead and buried; he would weep freely, his thoughts on the field, on the earth, but seeing no more the harvest.

And what would they say to him, those who were not ignorant of these matters? Supposing had wept in this way they would say to him: 'Do not grieve. What we buried in the earth is indeed no longer in the barn, no longer in our hands. But soon we shall go again to the field, and you will be happy in the beauty of the growing corn, where now you weep over the nakedness of ploughed earth. And he who now 1 earns what s ha 11 come from the sown wheat, he too will rejoice in the p1oughing and the sowing. He who had been unbelieving, or rather, who had been foolish and without experience, may perhaps have mourned before, but believing those who have experienced, he will go away comforted, and wait in hope for the harvest to come.