This Sunday, the Church Radically Challenges Our Misunderstanding About Death...

It’s good that The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls) Day is a Sunday this year.

It gives us a chance to focus on Church teaching about the four last things: Heaven, hell, death and judgment, at the beginning of November, the month dedicated to prayers for the dead.

Here are six takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: This feast day corrects millennia of misunderstandings about death.

“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want,” we pray in Sunday’s Psalm.

Christians have embraced that psalm as a vision of heaven, but Jewish people didn’t read it that way. In the Old Testament, the afterlife was not the goal of earthly life. We lived after death, but in Sheol, a “land of silence” where no one remembered orpraised or experienced God. A glimmer of the truth was there — but the “newer” Old Testament writings, closing in on the coming of Christ, started to develop that understanding of death more deeply. Ezekiel and Daniel predicted a new future for souls, one that, as Isaiah saw, would ultimately end death as we know it.

The afterlife was joyless before Christ, and early Christians knew how good they had it. That’s why a learned Jew like St. Paul erupted in paroxysms of joy when he contemplated death after Christ.

But as the years passed, every generation has had to re-learn the right attitude toward death. In 1600, Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls death “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” and the best Denmark’s prince can hope for from his own death is an untroubled sleep or a “convocation of worms.”

Continued below.