The month of November presents us with an opportunity to remember loved ones who have died. It is usually the case that Catholics pray for their departed relatives and friends.

The large number of persons who have died tragically, however, as a result of crime in recent years calls us, perhaps, to revise any narrow perception of this week’s Feast of All Souls, and how we might view the coming month.

Hardly a day passes, it seems, when the story of a gruesome killing does not grab the headlines. Death is all around us these days—in ways that it was not present a decade ago.

Our Christian faith must lead us in particular ways to deal with the spectre of death and the fear it brings. It has to lead us to give a particular witness to a world which is incapable of making sense of it. For the Christian believer, death—this temporal death—is not the end.

He or she is called to a unique perspective. Says St Paul: “We do not want you to be unaware … about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

The follower of Christ knows that this world is not home. We live here and now as members of a pilgrim Church in preparation for eternal life with God. The passing from this world of our brothers and sisters is a continual and pertinent reminder that we must live now with hearts set on living with God forever.

But, for the Christian too, life is present even in death; light is present in and through the darkness. In today’s Gospel, Bartimaeus the blind man sees more clearly than those with sight. He cries out to Jesus, the “Son of David”, recognising him as the Messiah. Sacred scripture is often filled with such irony and paradox.

Need for empathy

But, there is also an invitation in the suffering all around us—in the pictures of grieving families in our newspapers and on our television screens—to enter into the world of those who suffer. What is clear is that no one can claim to be immune from the effects of the suffering.

The comment of the mother of a 27-year-old man killed in Penal recently is to the point: “Everyday I see it on TV. Two, three people dying. I never thought it would reach home.”

More recently three men were gunned down at a nightclub in Arima when gunmen sprayed the area with bullets. There is a particular randomness and unpredictability about the present state of affairs,

In these circumstances there is a great need for empathy, to feel with those who are in pain because of tragedy. The danger is that we come too easily to a place of numbness, in an attempt to protect ourselves from the pain.

What has to sustain the Christian community in these often unbearable times is our faith in Christ who entered into death so all peoples might have life, “who tasted death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). What the Catholic community can offer the rest of society is the prayer of the Church.

Prayer does not excuse the Christian from acting in direct ways to alleviate the pain of those who suffer and of working to bring about a just and peaceful society. But in this month of November, we must unite in prayer for those who have died and for those who grieve.