As Catholics commemorate the faithful departed and pray for them in the month of November, I feel that perhaps I should share an experience that I had which helped me understand better the phrase “communion of saints”.
I have always thought that this Church term referred to a kind of spiritual support that those who are in Heaven, on Earth and in Purgatory give to one another as we are united in a community of love that transcends time and space. It was only after my late maternal grandmother passed away in 1994 that I had a powerful experience of what the phrase meant.
I had always been close to my maternal grandmother. She cooked for our family and told me stories from her Peranakan background (a fusion of Chinese and Malay cultures), and she was always there for my younger sister and me, supporting us in various ways through our lives.
I believe I was one of the few people who really understood her - her positive philosophy of life and her great capacity to live life to the full - and when she fell sick from a medical complication in 1994 at the age of 85 and had to be hospitalized, I kept praying for her full recovery. But she did not get better and later slid into a coma.
I remember one Sunday, as I was attending evening Mass during my grandmother’s illness, a man sat beside me whom I had never seen before. And all throughout that Mass, I had the strangest feeling that this man was the Lord himself. I had never had this kind of feeling before but it just grew and grew during the celebration.
At the end of the Mass, the man thanked me for sharing my hymnal with him and left. And I just sat there thinking to myself, “I’ve just sat beside the Lord!”
A few minutes after I returned home, the phone rang. It was the hospital asking my family to come to the hospital quickly to see my grandmother as she was gravely ill. At that moment, I was filled with an immense calm and peace that I knew did not come from me. And I told myself, “That is why the Lord came and sat beside me. He knew how much my grandmother meant to me, and he came to comfort me.”
When my family reached the hospital, my grandmother had already passed on. But that peace and calm remained with me and, in fact, continues to stay with me till today.
A few weeks after her funeral, I decided to take a weekend vacation at the nearby Indonesian island of Batam, just a short ferry ride from Singapore. As my taxi descended from the ferry terminal and made its way to the town center, all of a sudden, I felt as if the landscape changed before my eyes.
It was still the same buildings and landscape features that I had seen many times before when I had visited the island, but somehow the atmosphere surrounding what I saw changed. The people and the buildings felt powerfully familiar, and I felt as if I was returning home.
Then I felt the Lord saying to me, “This is how your grandmother is feeling right now. Don’t worry about her.”
About a month after this experience, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was sleeping in my bedroom in my former house and my grandmother came, patted me on the head and said what I felt were reassuring words. I couldn’t remember what she said except for one sentence that she spoke in the Peranakan dialect, “Sekarang tok sa pakay Eye Mo lagi” (I don’t need to use Eye Mo anymore).
My grandmother used to use the Eye Mo eyedrops when she was alive, and somehow that very ordinary statement gave me the assurance that she no longer experienced her earthly limitations. When I woke up, I found that I was lying in exactly the same position as in my dream.
I still continue to feel my grandmother’s loving presence, and I am grateful to the Lord for showing me, in a sense, that Heaven is about relationships, the relationship that God has with us (“For God so loved the world …”, John 3:16) and the relationships that we have with each other in the communion of saints, that transcends death. And also that when we experience love in our lives, that is already a taste of Heaven.
