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Month of the Holy Souls (Day 15)

November 15, 2026

Fr. John Colacino C.PP.S.

Day 15

A reading from the Second Book of Maccabees (7:1-4, 20-23)

It happened also that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king Antiochus, under torture with whips and thongs, to partake of unlawful swine’s flesh. One of them, acting as their spokesman, said, ‘What do you intend to ask and learn from us? For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors.’

The king fell into a rage, and gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated. These were heated immediately, and he commanded that the tongue of their spokesman be cut out and that they scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of the brothers and the mother looked on.

The mother was especially admirable and worthy of honourable memory. Although she saw her seven sons perish within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her hope in the Lord. She encouraged each of them in the language of their ancestors. Filled with a noble spirit, she reinforced her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage, and said to them, ‘I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.’

From a letter to a priest, "Last Thoughts" by Simone Weil (1943)

We know that joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it.

It is the same as when we see someone very dear to us after a long absence; the words we exchange with him do not matter, but only the sound of his voice, which assures us of his presence.

The knowledge of this presence of God does not afford consolation; it takes nothing from the fearful bitterness of affliction; nor does it heal the mutilation of the soul. But we know quite certainly that God's love for us is the very substance of this bitterness and this mutilation….

Even if there were nothing more for us than life on earth, even if the instant of death were to bring us nothing new, the infinite superabundance of the divine mercy is already secretly present here below in its entirety.

If, by an absurd hypothesis, I were to die without ever having committed any serious faults and yet all the same I were to fall to the bottom of hell, I should nevertheless owe God an infinite debt of gratitude for his infinite mercy, on account of my earthly life, and that notwithstanding the fact that I am such a poor unsatisfactory creature. Even in this hypothesis I should think all the same that t had received all my share of the riches of divine mercy. For already here below we receive the capacity for loving God and for representing him to ourselves with complete certainty as having the substance of real, eternal, perfect, and infinite joy. Through our fleshly veils we receive from above presages of eternity which are enough to efface all doubts on this subject.

What more can we ask or desire? A mother or a lover who knew for certain that her son, or her beloved, was full of joy would have no thought in her heart capable of asking or desiring anything else. We have much more. What we love is perfect joy itself. When we know this, even hope becomes superfluous; it no longer has any meaning. The only thing left to hope for is the grace not t o be disobedient here below. The rest is the affair of God alone and does not concern us.

That is why I lack nothing, although my imagination, mutilated as it is by overlong and uninterrupted suffering, cannot conceive of salvation as of something possible for me. What you say can have no effect except to persuade me that you really have some friendship for me. From that point of view I treasure your letter greatly. It has not been able to affect me in any other way. But that was not necessary.

I know enough of my miserable weakness to suppose that a little adverse fortune would perhaps suffice to fill my soul with suffering to such a point that for a long time no room would be left for the thoughts I have just described to you.

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