He Isn't as Far Away as He Feels

He Isn't as Far Away as He Feels

A cardinal lands on the fence outside your kitchen window, and something in you catches. A song comes on the radio — the one from your wedding, or the one he always sang badly and loudly in the car — and for a second, the room feels fuller instead of emptier. One of your kids does something with their hands, or laughs a certain way, and you have to sit down.

Most widows have moments like this. And sometimes they don't quite know what to think about them — whether they're real, or just grief playing tricks, or something a little embarrassing to admit out loud.

The Catholic Church has actual doctrine about this. It's called the Communion of Saints, and it is a beautiful part of our faith.

Every time we say the Apostles' Creed, we say the words "I believe in the Communion of Saints" — usually without stopping to ask what they mean. In plain language: the Church exists in three states. Some of us are still pilgrims here on earth. Some have died and are being purified. Some are already in glory. Not three separate, disconnected groups — one living body, still joined, where grace, prayer, and love genuinely flow between the living and the dead.

This is why we ask saints to pray for us. It's why Hebrews 12:1 describes us as "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" — not people who watched from a distance once, but people present and invested in how our race goes now.

I don't know the exact mechanism by which someone in heaven perceives us — the Church hasn't defined that level of detail. But I do know this: if love is made more complete in heaven and not less, it would be strange for that more complete love to somehow become less attentive to the people it belonged to on earth.

So you can talk to him. You can ask for his intercession, the way you'd ask a favorite saint. And you can trust the small moments — the cardinal, the song, the gesture in your child's hands — without needing to over-interpret them as coded messages. In a Church that teaches real, ongoing communion between the living and the dead, it is not foolish to feel his nearness. You may be brushing up against something true.

Listen to the full episode: "The Communion of Saints — Why Your Husband Isn't as Far Away as He Feels" — Episode 8 of Mosaic: Beauty in Every Broken Piece.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-communion-of-saints/id6784076332?i=1000786072731