When the Veil Is Thin: Love, Loss, and Communion | Providence Podcast

This week we celebrate All Saints and All Souls, which always come around as the year transitions to its closing. There’s something fitting about bringing to mind and heart our loved ones and holy ones who have transitioned into the afterlife. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the earth reflects this transition. The leaves are beautiful before they go, to be sure, but they’re dying and the tree is letting them go. But the leaves never really leave, do they? I mean, they’re not going to rake themselves either, but they become part of the Earth and nourish it and nurture it, so they’re still present.

These feasts have me waxing eloquent about leaves and thinking about death, but not in an uncomfortable way, and certainly not in a scary way either. When I was younger, I was very uncomfortable with death, even scared of it. I wasn’t scared of dying myself – that wasn’t even something I thought about – but I was scared of losing people I loved, and when someone in our family died, I was scared of that too. I’m not sure where that came from exactly, but I wonder if our society enculturates us into that discomfort. However, death is a natural part of life.

I was still uneasy with death when I entered religious life, though I didn’t realize just how uneasy until my great-aunt died. She belonged to the same community, and I was a novice at the time. The evening she died, one of the sisters called me to come and be with her. I was living on that same property, but she died before I could get to her room. When I arrived, the sisters invited me to come and sit with her anyway. And I remember thinking, What? Why would I do that? I loved my aunt, but I was uncomfortable at the thought of sitting with her body. Despite that discomfort, though, I did sit with her, and it was peaceful. Looking back, I’m glad the sisters invited me to do that. I wouldn’t have done it on my own, but I’m grateful I had the opportunity to be with her.

Belonging to my community has shifted how I feel about death and has made me more comfortable with it. Like a lot of communities in the United States, we have many older members, and so we do experience death more regularly than most people do. However, it’s never commonplace to lose one of ours, and it’s not the frequency of death that has made me more comfortable.

Part of it is our strong belief in the afterlife, but I think it’s mostly about how death brings out our love for each other. We don’t always express that love in the day-to-day of our lives together, but when one of us is dying, we’re very present with her. We keep a vigil, and lots of sisters come to sit with her. We whisper affirmations and tender expressions and show affection, and in that space, we surround each other with love and prayer too. We may make the journey into death alone, but as that journey happens, we surround our sister with love and presence and prayer.

We just lost a sister last week, a gentle, kind, joyful person. As she was dying, I was in her room with a close friend of hers in our community and several other sisters, and it was such a gentle place – probably because of the person she was and because of how much we all loved her. It was sacred.

As I was sitting there, I was thinking about how much I loved her, and I was also reflecting on how much I loved the other sisters in the room. It suddenly dawned on me that this was a thin place, a space where the veil between this life in the afterlife is very thin, almost not separate at all. Maybe the veil is always thin but the rest of the time it seems like a solid wall. In that moment, I had a sense of all our sisters gathered around us in that room. They were so present: sisters who had died just this spring, sisters who had died a long time ago, even sisters I’d never met. Their presence was so vivid that I almost felt like I should get more chairs. I realized how close we are in that space, maybe closer than we are the rest of the time when we’re so caught up in the details of everyday life. But in that thin place, each of us was holy and surrounded by holiness, and our love for each other was so clear. It was a lived encounter with the Communion of Saints, all of us in communion with each other.

As I think about it now, I wonder: What if that communion is always there? What if we are already one, even when we can’t see it or feel it? What if the love that was so palpable in that room wasn’t something that suddenly appeared in the presence of death, but something that had been there all along, beneath the busyness and distractions of our everyday lives?

That sacred space was beautiful, but it didn’t take away the pain of loss. After a sister dies, things can actually get busy. There are plans to make, services to finalize, people to call. We bustle around because sisters are nothing if we’re not planners and doers and fixers. Plus, things need to be done, and doing those things may be one way we cope, because even though we experience death somewhat regularly, it’s never easy. Because it’s such a regular part of our reality, it can feel overwhelming. We still need to be with our grief and love one another in our grief. That’s real, too.

And as we sit with our grief, I hope we can stay in touch, at least a little, with that thin place—with the beauty of that connection, even when it’s bittersweet. I hope we all can: those of you in religious communities, those of you in families, all of us who have lost people we love. And I hope we remember the holy people who are part of our legacy, people we may never have met but feel close to because we are so deeply connected with one another.

I think All Saints and All Souls are essentially about communion. In our busy lives we come and go and interact with each other. We love each other, we love our neighbors, and we drive each other crazy. We strive and we succeed and we fail and we do it all again the next day. And yet, underneath all of that, something deeper holds us together. We belong to one another. We are connected in ways we may not always recognize. We are one in God.

There’s an invitation, especially at this time of year, to reflect on the transitions of our lives and the people we love, also trusting that we will never be separated. And maybe we also bring to mind our loved ones who are with God in a different way than we are now. We remember them, we love them, and we’re grateful for them, even when remembering still aches.

And God is with us. God is in the thin places where we feel that connection, but God is also in the thick places when everything feels disconnected and we struggle to find our way back to each other. Death is a part of life, and like life, it’s a mystery. As the First Letter of John reminds us, “What we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like God, for we shall see God as God is.”

As we live into this mystery, may we be aware of all the moments when we catch a glimpse of God as God is. And may those glimpses remind us of what has been true all along: that we belong to one another, that we are held in love, and that even when we cannot see the connections that bind us, we are one in God.

For Reflection:

• What resonates with you in all this?

• When you reflect on All Saints and All Souls, who comes to your mind and heart? What feelings surface? What memories?

• What’s God’s invitation for you?

By Sister Leslie Keener, CDP

Sister Leslie Keener, CDP is the director of God Space, a vibrant spirituality ministry building community in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. A Sister of Divine Providence, she holds a Master’s in Ministry and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Retreats from Creighton University. Sister Leslie guides retreats, offers spiritual direction, and nurtures vocations within her community. Passionate about helping people encounter God in everyday life, she delights in the Virtue of Simplicity, meaningful conversations, dancing, and spicy food along the way.