Dear Theophilus, 

In your last letter you mention that the concept of dying often comes up in our discussions. You are, of course, right and maybe what we can do is explore death in the light of our faith. This is a topic, as I mentioned in my last letter which is taboo in our society but is an important topic because it touches every single human being that has ever lived.

I think it is ironic, when we consider history, that in the Middle Ages all the most joyful events took place at the cemetery and nobody was scandalized by this. How different things are today. The attitude of our culture to death, to a large extent, reveals its attitude to life. There is an almost total contradiction of what death means when seen through the eyes of the Church or seen through the eyes of our world.

Fundamentally, our society sees no meaning in death whatsoever. We live under the idea that the meaning and value of life is within life itself without any reference to anything outside the visible, tangible world. Our gods have become happiness, self-fulfilment, empowerment. But death is a fact and a fact that even the unbeliever has to face. One reaction has been to cut down on the unpleasantness of death and to minimize its disruptive effects. Society has brought forth the medical practitioner, the funeral director and technology, to make death as painless and unnoticeable as possible. The medical profession fights death to the limits of its capabilities, sometimes using heroic means to keep the body alive. If this fails, the mortician is called in and carries out what used to be done by the family. A game of pretence takes over as the dying process has moved from the home to the hospital and the funeral parlor. Ironically, in spite of our many achievements in unravelling the mysteries of nature, we are the first civilization in the long history of man to ignore death. What we attempt to do is to humanize death and to make it more palatable, more acceptable as something that is part of the natural process.

When we try to repress something, especially something as important as death, it is natural that neuroses arise. Psychiatrists and psychologists are doing a booming business because people have come to realize that if death has no meaning, then life has none also.

We must emphasize the radical difference that Christianity brought to man's concept of death and to be more precise, to death itself. In a sense, the function of all religions is to tame death and to neutralize it. Primitive man was not so much afraid of death as of the dead interfering in his life. The task of religion was to keep the dead separate from the living and to assuage the dead so that they would not intrude. Because of this, the burial place is separated from the town or city; it is outside the walls. There is a sort of co-existence that arises between the dead and the living with the living offering food to the dead and showing respect to them. Just think of the pyramids of Egypt and what their intention were. Religion, therefore, in the beginning has to do with the dead and God is a relative latecomer on the scene.

Whereas for religion, death and the dead are the central preoccupation, for Christianity, God takes center place. If we look at the Old Testament, it is the thirst for God which is the prime pursuit. There is very little speculation about death and the dead. We can now better understand why some of the writings of the New Testament are referred to as Gospels, that is, good news. Here we have the fulfilment of the God-centered understanding of death. Death is revealed as not something natural, but an enemy and a corruptor. The Gospels announce that death is the result of sin and that in Christ's death, the spiritual factor of death as separation between God and man, is abolished. A new life is given to all those who are united in Christ, a life untainted by death. It is interesting that in early Christianity, there is hardly any concern with biological death and there is no preoccupation with or interest in, with the state of the dead between their death and the final Resurrection. The early Church buried their dead in accordance with the funerary practises of the society that they lived in. Nothing seemed, on the surface to have changed, but it did change and changed very fundamentally.

Death now ceased to be a separation from God, and therefore, from life. The Church lives in the quiet certitude that those who have died, live in Christ; they are there where the light of God's face visits them. In a sense, we are all dead because we have died in baptism and have a new life hidden in Christ.

The death which our society forces on us is the old pre-Christian concept of death, naturalized, tamed, humanized, banalized. The funeral dirge, with the coming of Christ, has become transformed into a song of praise - alleluia. It is in the services and ceremonies that we get to see and experience the content of the Christian faith. If we were to look at the art of the catacombs, the caves where the persecuted Christians hid, met, and were buried, what would strike us is that the general topic is not death but baptism. The reason for this is that baptism is the death of death as we know it and represents the regeneration into a new type of life over which death has no power. With time, as Christianity became accepted by the state, the cemetery returns into the city because the dead must be with the living because death as separation has been overcome.

In the past, the body of the deceased resided in the home and on the journey from the home to the grave, it made a stopover in the Church. The service in the Church has psalm 119 as its center. This is a passionate hymn to divine love, the glorification of God's saving commandments. The psalm shows the meaning of Christ's death - His all-consuming love for God. In His commandments, God reveals Himself and therefore, one should not only obey the Law, but love it also. In the Matins, when Christ is asked how He who is the author of life can die, replies that there are no limits to His carrying out the will of the Father. The psalm also reveals the lasting reality of Christ's death for all of creation in that the death of each and every Christian is identified with the death of Christ. What does it mean that we die in Christ if not that His unique death is given to us as our death so as to enter into the Body of Christ. What the psalm shows (this psalm, by the way, is the one sung on Holy Saturday) is that each death is an entrance into the wide and bright quiet of the Great and Holy Saturday. To each verse of the psalm, the Church responds with the singing of alleluia. This is a word that could be translated as a call to praise God. Its function here is to proclaim the joy of God's presence; death is now the entering into the presence of God. The funeral grief has given way to the burst of joy.

Another important component of this service is psalm 51, the penitential psalm. It expresses something which the Church sees as absolutely necessary - a need for a total and radical change in one's vision of life, centered on conversion and repentance. It expresses certitude that through Christ's death, sins are forgiven and life in God is restored. Death is no longer a barrier; it has become a door. Death is no longer opaque; it has become transparent. Death has become a passage into God as the prokimenon before the Gospel reading proclaims: "Blessed is the way in which thou shalt walk today, o soul, for the place of rest is prepared for thee." Death has opened the door to blessedness.

At this point, Theophilus, I would like to say a few things about the general direction that my letter has taken. It is very difficult to have the important and ultimate things in life described in a rational manner. For this we need poetry, songs, worship and that is why, if we want to try to understand death, we must discuss it by referring to it through liturgy. This may seem as an imprecise method, but it is the most inclusive one. If you want to understand people, you don't only listen to their rational discourses; more importantly, you see how they behave in joy and especially, in sorrow. That is when you truly see what is important to them and what they really believe in and that is why I have referred to some aspects of the service for the deceased. In my next letter, I will continue along the same lines looking at how the services for the dead came about and what their content is.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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