Address for the Feast of All Souls’
2 November 2025
©Suzanne Grimmett
To love is to face inevitable loss. In this life there is no other way.
This might make Jesus’ words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” seem trite. Of course our hearts are troubled! And not just troubled but desolate …broken … bereft. When we love, we cannot help but sense the eternal. Love itself awakens a sense of what is eternal in us…the spiritual self that will brook no separation. Malcolm Guite’s poem inspired by this very famous reading from John’s Gospel names this saying, “We cleave forever to the one we choose, only to find forever in the grave.”
The one we choose may be a lifetime intimate partner, but there are so many other griefs that we do not, I think, fully acknowledge. Certainly nearly all of us will experience the death of a parent, so that grief too, is understood and acknowledged for the painful separation it is. It can however be difficult to explain to people at times why we continue to grieve so long and painfully for a dear friend. Grief is what we experience in any relationship where we are trying to make sense of a loss when we feel in our bones the eternal nature of our love. Love, in all its forms, tolerates no separation.
It is in the face of this truth that we might hear Jesus’ words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Jesus did know the wrongness we sense of eternity being interrupted, and it is into this deep ache that he speaks these words of comfort. Christianity is the good news of a God who put on flesh and experienced the wrench of eternity interrupted by death… so that the rupture may be healed and we find our way home to God and to one another, sustained in the love we have known in this lifetime. Jesus speaks these words because he knows intimately the pain and sorrow we carry and so brings not only words of comfort but the sacrificial power of love to heal the breach. Malcolm Guite writes in his sonnet;
You know too well this trouble in our hearts
Your heart is troubled for us, feels it too,
You share with us in time that shears and parts
To draw us out of time and into you.
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death” we hear in the reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians- a phrase adopted in the Harry Potter novels because of its resonance with the kind of ‘deep magic from the dawn of time’, to use the language of another great story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Such stories remind us of our deep intuition that we live in an enchanted universe if we could but see beyond the veil. We sense this enchantment in every true love of our lives- without love our lives become colourless and lifeless. Yet in this part of the story, we know the joy of love but experience its unavoidable counterpart of grief.
Into this Jesus speaks of a place prepared for us and for those whom we love. This is mystery that with our earthbound sight we cannot comprehend. It was enough to leave the courageous, bemused disciple named Thomas with so many urgent questions. When Jesus tells him that he knows the way to the place where he is going…the place we might, with Malcolm Guite call home…Thomas protests that he does not understand. This is when Jesus gives us those immortal words, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus calls us not to an exacting religion of rules and dogma, but into a way. More than that, it is a way God has already walked on our behalf, ensuring that the love we know in this lifetime is never lost. Far from being lost, Jesus tells us we will know ourselves at home, because where he is, there we shall be also. With us, in Christ, there shall also be those whom we know in our hearts we will never really lose, because love tolerates no separation. Jesus speaks these words of comfort to us, knowing our hearts will break, but assuring us that our love will never end. Malcolm Guite finishes his sonnet with words of great hope not only for those we have loved and lost but also for ourselves as we journey these days without them.
I go that you might come to where I am
Your word comes home to us and brings us home.