In the squire’s pew in an Anglican church near him, wrote Father Ronald Knox, was a brass plaque reading Absentes adsunt, meaning “The absent are present.” In an Anglican church that meant present as memories or in some vague spiritual way. Unsatisfactory to me, but the best Anglicans could do given their theology.

For the Catholic, the dead are present to us not just as memories, Knox explained. “The true bond which links us, immortal beings, to one another is the exchange of our prayers. … It is only when we forget the dead that they are absent; we have but to kneel down, and they are present.” 

I think of All Souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, as a feast of friendship, as the celebration of the continued and continuing presence of the dead with us and in our lives. It declares the good news that we have been separated but not severed. The absent are present, truly if invisibly present, not just pictures in our minds or feelings in our hearts.

Neglected Good News

That is a neglected aspect of the Church’s good news, I think. I may well have missed something, but in my experience of All Souls’ Day and the Church’s teaching about the dead, the piety and preaching emphasizes their having gone on before us. It’s celebrated as a feast of memory and of hope, and crucially of connection, but not so much as a feast of presence. 

We can ask for our departed loved ones’ prayers, and being able to ask someone we know for help is a great gift — an amazing gift — by itself. But we ask for their prayers in the way years ago we would have sent someone across the ocean an airmail letter, someone we wouldn’t see for a very long time, and in due course gotten an airmail letter back.

At least I experienced it this way and people I’ve talked to did as well. We saw the obvious good news (the connection), but not the less obvious good news (the presence). As Knox suggested, they’re with us in the way a spouse or a child or a friend is with us when we’re downstairs and they’re upstairs, or maybe, better, a few towns away. We feel their presence even though we don’t see them.

Knox’s insight appears in a series of meditations he wrote every month for 12 years in The Sunday Times. (One can’t imagine such a thing now — a Catholic priest asked to write about religion in the most establishment newspaper in England.) The articles, each about 350 words, appeared in two books, Stimuli and Lightning Meditations, from which the quote is taken.

I suspect that Knox understood the distinction I felt and also understood how much secular people wanted the less obvious good news. Most of The Sunday Times’ readers would have been religiously Protestant even if they weren’t at all religious or their religion was a matter of culture and social obligation rather than faith. They would have believed that once a man dies, he’s gone, whatever happens in the next world, if there is one. You might see him after you die, you might not, but for now he’s definitely out of the picture.

That we are severed from the dead has been almost a Protestant dogma. Those who believe in eternal life believe they will see their loved ones in the next life, but for now they are no more accessible than a star light-years away. The promise of meeting in the next world proclaims real good news, especially compared with the secular belief that the dead are gone completely.

The Best Good News

But it’s not the best good news, not the even better good news the Church proclaims. We will not just see our loved ones in the next world. We can enjoy their presence now. The mechanism may be mysterious to us and the presence a spiritual one, but they are truly with us when we pray.

Some people, even very secular people, hope for this better good news, even though they may not know they want it. The loss of a loved one feels like something that should not be, even if you think it must be because death ends a life forever.

This explains the popularity of spiritualism, which flourished in England after the shock of World War I, when many people wanted a tangible experience of the reality that their dead live. Knox had lived through the period and would remember how eager people were to believe that the dead had not left them.

He did not deny their hope, even though as a Catholic he disapproved of the way they tried to satisfy it. As a pastor, he would have seen this feeling in the people he served, and as a priest who was also a popular intellectual, he would have heard it expressed by successful people well outside religious commitment.

He knew what losing a loved one felt like. He made a point in A Retreat for Lay People of reassuring his readers that despite their hope of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, they were right to feel such pain when a loved one dies. “How empty, how desolate the world feels,” he wrote, “when we have been robbed, by Death or by separation, of somebody with whom we were accustomed to share, and to enjoy it! How every memory of the past turns to a regret, because that chapter is closed!” Like St. John Henry Newman, he was a man with many friends, but a few friends of his heart whom he loved deeply and whose loss hurt him badly.

I’ve had the same experience. People in our local place, a townie dive bar, sometimes bring it up, because I’m recognized as “religious” and also the kind of nerd who talks about such things. One night I went to say hello to two friends, a couple in their late 30s, and was greeted with “What do you think about death?” They’d been talking about dying, and she was comfortable with the idea that death was final, but he was not.

We talked for a long time and after a while I realized that he, a man generous with friendship, wasn’t just concerned for his own survival, but for the survival of his friends and family. If I read him right, immortality only made sense to him as something to be hoped for if we shared it with others we loved in this world.

I hadn’t then seen the less obvious good news, but now I see that he wanted it without realizing it. As did I for a long time. Finally seeing that God brings us close even across death, that our friends remained friends with whom we had a real if mysterious connection, felt like waking up on Dec. 26 and finding another present under the tree.

His Readers’ Hope

Knox knew what it was to wish that a loved one was still close, at least a few towns away. He assumes that hope in his readers, I think, including the many who wouldn’t know what they really hoped for, which is why he wrote the meditation as he did. He ends it: “Secular remembrance, as well as Church custom, causes us to think specially of our dead each November. As we tidy away the fallen leaves, we are to recall the memories of those friendships which the year has cost us.” 

And then, having tied his subject to a normal feeling his secular readers would recognize, he completes the sentence with the real good news: “and, by the exchange of prayer, represent to ourselves the absent. … The just souls are in God’s hands, and therefore close to us.”