Today’s readings: Isaiah 25, 6-9; Romans 5, 5-11; Matthew 11, 25-30.

There is a difference between knowing and believing, between acknowledging facts and seeing beyond those facts. That death puts an end to suffering can be something quite understandable for the human mind. That explains why people in anguish wish to die. That is also why people opt to procure death in certain circumstances even if that remains morally questionable.

Isaiah in the first reading speaks of death as removing “the mourning veil covering all peoples”. The Scriptures themselves have a fertile imagination, like when Isaiah himself again speaks of “a banquet of rich food and fine wines”. Our problem is when we speak of hope, when we come to imagine the beyond, to figure out what that beyond may consist of. Jesus in the gospel speaks of giving rest to our souls, of a yoke that becomes easy and a burden that becomes light.

There was a time when the virtue of hope was exclusively linked to afterlife. In the wake of a more down-to-earth mentality, we tended to go to the other extreme, seeking to locate hope exclusively in the construction of a better world and a guarantee of a more comfortable existence.

But it is faith that sustains hope and keeps our gaze mainly on the Lord of life. Hope without faith can be deceptive. Faith without hope can be blind. For so long, philosophers and theologians thought of themselves as the sole interpreters of the universe, as those who could dare answer the questions linked to life after death. Science, on the other hand, was accused of being reductionist, nihilistic, and a threat to our moral stability.

“Nihilism,” states the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his polemic against science and technology, “is the fundamental movement of the history of the West”. That may sound today too apocalyptic. As Mark Dooley writes commenting on this, while applauding the political advances of modern times, we need to resist the view that a religious consciousness is incompatible with those advances.

We cannot afford to succumb to those scenarios that tell us that we are drowning in a quagmire of nihilism and despair. Neither the philosopher, the theologian, nor the scientist has all the answers or a way of unlocking the ultimate clues of our existence or of the universe.

Karl Rahner, a leading 20th-century theologian, has been accused of being ‘fascinated by death’, as many of us may be, after all. He claims that in our accounts of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, “we do not mean that things go on after death as though we have only changed horses, as Feuerbach puts it, and rode on. Eternity is not an immeasurably long-lasting mode of pure time, but a mode of the spirit and freedom”.

It is the Eucharist that the Christian locates as the site of human hope in as much as the Eucharist is the recollection of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian hope, as Rahner puts it, is the memory of a death that always gazed toward a resurrection; precisely because the God we believe in is the God whom no one can see without dying.

On this particular day we all love to remember the loved ones whom we still carry in our hearts. But we embrace also all those who died a lonely death, whom we might have heard about anonymously in a news bulletin as numbers but with whom we still share our humanity. This is a day not only of remembrance of those departed, but an opportunity for all of us still here struggling to make sense not of death, but of the most pressing questions of life.

The journey may be long and winding. But we need not see life always as having to choose between the leap in the darkness of transcendence and hiding in the pure immanence of the familiar world. There is so much that remains hidden to our eyes on the road but which, as Jesus says, the Father gradually reveals to us. That revelation, not of truths but of a presence, depends to some extent on our receptivity which, no doubt, can so easily become obstructed in daily living.