One of the earliest disappointments I experienced as a newly ordained priest was that the first three sick people I anointed never recovered. They all died. I was then serving in a rural community in Eastern Nigeria where many had no access to good healthcare. The visit of a priest was not only for spiritual healing but also, in faith, for divine intervention. It pained me deeply that God did not fulfill their hope through my ministry. Troubled, I confided in my spiritual director, Fr. Emekaekwue, who in his wisdom said: “Wouldn’t it be better to think differently? You prepared these brothers and sisters for heaven. Remember, you are a minister of life, not of death.”
All Souls Day should remind us of life—your life, my life, the life of this world and the world to come. Faith invites us to look beyond the shadows of death and celebrate the lives of those who, through life and death, remain with us even now in a new way.
So, I share a message of life as we remember our brothers and sisters who have gone before us.
Learning How to Live
My first class this semester at DePaul University began on September 11. Since the day coincided with the anniversary of 9/11, we observed a moment of silence for all who perished. To honor them, I asked my students: How do you intend to die? The question shocked them—it was, after all, their first class of the year.
But at the end, I reminded them: we do not choose when or how we die. Even those who take their own lives do not make a free choice; suicide is a sickness, and no one should blame themselves forever for such tragedies. The only true choice we have is how we live.
That is the most fundamental reality that confronts us all. Making the right choices every day is the training we must give our children—and ourselves. It begins with what we think life is and how we embrace it. We come from God and we return to God, and we bear responsibility not only for our own lives but also for the lives of others.
Viktor Frankl, in The Doctor and the Soul, captures this beautifully:
“As soon as we lend our minds to the essence of human responsibility, we cannot forbear to shudder: there is something fearful about human responsibility. But at the same time something glorious… It is glorious to know that the future of things and people around us depends—even if only a little—on our decisions at any given moment.”
The people we remember today—our family, friends, mentors, and heroes—are those whose choices shaped us in meaningful ways. We thank the Lord for their lives and witness, for their love and friendship, and for the gift of memory that keeps them near in spirit and in the communion of the saints with us—the church militants. We rejoice in the promise of new life and the communion we share with all the faithful departed—our ancestors, our saints, and our beloved dead. Each of us carries in our hearts the memories of the lost one and the pain and emptiness that comes from grief. May God’s never-failing love fill the emptiness you feel at this annual celebration with grace and hope that beyond the shadows of suffering and death lies the hope of the Resurrection—Jesus Christ is our Hope beyond the grave.
Learning How to Die
The ancients, long before Christ, saw education as learning to die. In the Greek world, philosophy trained the student to rise above the passions and partial viewpoints of the senses toward truth and goodness. This was a way of dying to self—what Jesus would later call the path to abundant life—to know the One True God and Jesus Christ God’s Son who came to earth to save us (John 17:3). One Neoplatonist put it this way:
“If all things are beings only by virtue of goodness, and if they participate in the Good, then the first must necessarily be a good that transcends being. Souls of value despise being for the sake of the Good, when they willingly place themselves in danger for their country, their loved ones, or for virtue.”
Similarly, a Stoic poet sang:
“To everyone upon this earth death comes soon or late, but how can one die more nobly than fighting for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?”
Learning to die was not merely an act of valor. It was a spiritual discipline—a focusing of the mind on what truly matters. It freed one from fear, anxiety, and the tyranny of desire, and opened the heart to joy and gratitude. The ancient wisdom, echoed in the African proverb “Fix your eyes on the prize,” reminds us that life’s value lies in its transience.
The Epicureans believed that remembering death makes each moment infinitely valuable. Horace wrote:
“Believe that each day that has dawned will be your last; then you will receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.”
Seneca, too, taught that “it is a wonderful thing to learn thoroughly how to die—think on death.” He added:
“He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery. Keep death before your eyes every day, and you will never have any abject thought nor any excessive desire.”
These insights reveal a profound freedom: no circumstance can rob us of the freedom to choose our response to life. To live with death before our eyes is to see life’s true meaning—to find peace in the fulfillment and consummation of life as gift and to live fully in the present unencumbered by excessive preoccupation about what is to come.
Martin Heidegger, in our modern age, called philosophy a preparation for death—the lucid anticipation of our end that gives authenticity to our existence. Between lucidity and diversion, between dying to self and living for others, lies the choice of the wise. If we lived life to the full, death would not be an ending but a homecoming—a rest beyond our imagination. This is why our true vocation here on earth is to empty ourselves like Jesus Christ on the Cross and to pour ourselves into others in an unstinting gratuitous and non-transactional love. This way, at our death we would have filled the world with the inner treasure which God has given us. At death, we would have emptied ourselves totally by pouring into others in such a way that eternity becomes God’s own sole moment of filling us with the eternal glory that is beyond our human imagination—what no eye has seen nor any heart ever contemplated or imagined what God has prepared to those who love him (1Corinthian 2: 9).
Hope Beyond the Grave
All Souls Day calls us to this hope: the hope that love is stronger than death. For Christians, death is not the end but a passage into the fullness of life. Our dead live with us still—in the rhythm of our prayers, in the stories we tell, in the communion of saints in the love that we share that cannot be defeated or destroyed that binds heaven and earth and unites us as the Church of God.
This vision resonates deeply with the African sense of continuity, and fullness of abundant life in an unbroken chain of relationship and participation in the life of the living, the living dead and the not-yet-born. The ancestors are not gone; they dwell among us in the work of our hands and the songs of our hearts; we live from their treasures, and they provide for us pointers and God’s footprints after the example of the Son of God. Remembering them is to celebrate the love that endures beyond the grave.
Hope, then, is not mere optimism—it is the courage to live into the light and truth of Christ with the certainty of faith that death does not have the last word. Hope transforms mourning into mission. It sends us into the world to comfort the sorrowful, defend the poor, and heal the wounds of the living, and to follow the Lord so that amidst the ambiguities and complexities of life we hold high the touch of hope through our daily witness to the truth of the Gospel.
Visit us today.
Heal the emptiness in hearts that mourn, .
and comfort those broken by grief. .
Teach us to live each day with gratitude and joy, .
to trust our future into your hands, .
and to embrace your art of living in humble surrender to your will.
Come and Have Your Rest
Jesus invites us, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” The rest he offers is not mere relief from our troubles, nor an escape into some distant paradise. It is the peace of being united with him—today, here, in the transforming grace of the present moment. Like the disciples who returned to tell Jesus what they had done, each of us has been sent into the world with a mission: to sing a unique song, to bless and ennoble the earth through our heads, hearts, and hands. The Christian vocation is a daily surrender to God—an offering of all that we are, that the realities of this life may be shaped by divine love.
We reenact the life of Christ whenever we make life-giving choices, especially for those who suffer or are forgotten. At the end of each day, the Lord asks us, “What have you done with this day?” May our answer be a life spent in faith, hope, and love—squandering ourselves for God and for others.
Such a life restores meaning to existence and gives hope to the world. It teaches us to let go of our burdens, anxieties, and vain pursuits—to allow God’s light to shine through us. The question, then, is not when will I die? but how am I living today? What burdens am I carrying for others? What hope am I bringing to those around me? What will I be remembered for? Who and what cause am I pouring my life into? Through life to death, from death to eternal life in the Lord, may God be praised in us and in the world. May the Souls of the faithful departed through the Mercy of God rest in Peace, Amen.
A Prayer of Hope
Lord Jesus, Lord of Life,
Visit us today.
Heal the emptiness in hearts that mourn,
and comfort those broken by grief.
Teach us to live each day with gratitude and joy,
to trust our future into your hands,
and to embrace your art of living in humble surrender to your will.
Banish the fear of death and the anxieties that rob us of joy.
Open our eyes to the beauty hidden in ordinary things.
When our journey ends,
may your mercy meet us at heaven’s gate with those words of Scripture:
“Come, you blessed of my Father… come and have your rest.”
What joy to see our beloved who are gone!
What beauty to be united with all creation!
What hope that this journey is not in vain.
For we believe, O Lord, that you will reconcile all things in Christ,
and that when the new Easter dawns on a renewed creation,
we shall rejoice forever in your peace. Amen.