Dear Theophilus, 

As I promised you in my last letter, we will continue with our consideration of death as viewed by our faith.

I would like to start by looking at prayers offered for the dead. In this area, we encounter two formidable forces at work - the old and never-dying religion of the dead, and the other is, culture. If we were to consider the development of the service for the dead we would see that the direction taken in funeral services is towards non-scriptural content. For example, some psalms get displaced by poems called stikheras. This has had an enormous influence on the liturgy for the dead and there are, as a result, two discernible traditions in the service.

The first difference concerns the participation of the deceased himself in the funeral service. What characterizes the first, older tradition is the almost total absence of any liturgical differentiation between the dead and the living. It is not so much our service for him as the service of the Church, in all her totality, which includes the dead and the living. It is the celebration by the Church, of Christ's death, into which we also enter. Therefore, the words that we utter, the deceased also speaks and the words that he speaks, also express our thoughts. The only prayer identifiable as the prayer for the dead is the prayer that begins "O God of Spirits and all the flesh...". With the appearance of hymnography (poetry and songs composed outside scripture), the tonality of the service changes because it introduces a distinctive difference between the dead and us. We pray but he no longer prays with us because, hymnography answers, death is silence. At the end of the service, the dead person speaks but he addresses not God, but us, to help him with our prayers in his solitude where he groans, with a moan, alleluia. The most joyful hymn of the Church is now moaning and groaning. The second change is the whole concept of death. In all hymnography, there is not one single reference to the death of Christ nor to His Resurrection. It is as if our death has nothing to do with Christ's death. Death is again horror and separation and gloom and darkness. The Church teaches that there is no separation; the funeral hymn says, lo, we are parted. The Church sees the departed in a place of brightness; the funeral hymn says he takes up his abode in gloom. Where the early Church says "With the saints..", the funeral hymn says he is interred with the dead. Here, the physical, biological death occupies the center of the stage - the horror of decomposition, the ugliness of death is stressed.

The third change concerns the understanding of eternal rest and deals not so much with a changed vocabulary as with the nuances of the ideas expressed. Rest has been used by the Church from the beginning as a metaphor for death, but this allows for two different sets of connotations. It is clear that the early Church sees in death a Jewish connotation - on the seventh day, God rested. It is in this divine rest, of the rest on Holy Saturday, that man participates during death. Rest here does not mean inactivity but sanctification and fulfilment of work. Christ, by entering into death, conferred rest onto it. In the funeral hymns, the meaning and context of the word rest has changed. Rest is now radically opposed to life. In scripture, life is never meaningless for it comes from God; in the hymns of the service, life is meaningless because it ends in death. This transitory life is a shadow - unreal and illusory.

The fourth change introduced concerns the intercession for the dead. "I beg and implore you all that you will pray without ceasing unto Christ that I be not doomed," says the deceased in the service. In the first layer of the service, the relationship between the dead and the living is that of communion, of indestructible union with Christ. Psalm 119 is not read in its totality presently at our services because its sense has been lost as the very spirit of the service has changed. The common root of all these changes has been the virtual disappearance, not from doctrine, not from the essential tradition, but from the Christian mentality and piety, of the eschatological vision (eschatology deals with the end times and eschatological refers to seeing the destiny of everything, that is, how does our death, relate to the end of all creation). The eschatology of the early Church was cosmic (all-inclusive) whereas, ours tends to be more individualistic. The early Church's interest, to put it simply, is not what happens to me when I die, but what will happen to the whole cosmos when Christ returns. Slowly, with the passage of time, we see the shift of interest from the cosmic to the individual. In the early Church, death was at the center but death belonging to Christ in the sacrament of baptism and in the Eucharist. In the individualized eschatology, death reappears not as a spiritual reality, but as the physical, biological death, the visible separation.

The liturgical services of the Church do not fundamentally differentiate between the living and the dead. Worship is the communion of saints, a corporate act, which transcends any physical separation that we may experience. If the early Church had no special services for the dead, the reason for this was not that she forgot about them, but, because her whole liturgical life is the celebration of the defeat of death as separation and the services therefore, are commemorative. For the Hebrew, the word memory is not a passive term but an active one, characteristic of God. All that exists, exists because God remembers it - death is falling out of memory. The Eucharist is therefore the remembering of all who are in Christ. " Remember, O Lord", is already a prayer to keep alive. This is why the names of the deceased is read aloud at the altar - they are remembered and therefore called into life in Christ.

The early Church totally ignores the distinction between praying to and for, the dead. The intercession is mutual here. We pray because of our sinfulness. Sin is not only a particular act, but, it is also an eternal sadness for it is the knowledge of the immense betrayal of God by man. One cannot be free of this sadness, even if one is a saint with Christ. As long as the world exists, there can be no prayer without repentance. Prayer always has three parts to it: remember, have mercy, and forgive.

Private commemorations of the dead are accepted within the Church but these services are limited to prevent a return to the old concept of death as separation, because private already implies a form of separation. What the dead need is not solitude but the presence of the Church in its solidarity. Death has ceased to be private because death has ceased to be a separation.

In speaking of the dead, it is important to underline the fact that destiny is not petrified at the moment of death. The life of every person continues to have repercussions until the world ends, and man's eternal and final destiny is not set until the final accounting is in. We pray for the dead partially to show that our prayers are a form of evidence in support of our love for the deceased whose good has moved us to pray.

In a sense, when we consider the two strands in the service for the dead, what we see are the two aspects through which we experience and see death in our lives here. Death is not pleasant; it is decomposition; it is burial into the soil. This is not denied and this brings much pain and sorrow. Death is tragic and monstrous and yet, death ultimately, is the only thing that gives us hope. Imagine living to an infinite time in the conditions that we experience now, with pain, suffering, fear. We know that we long for something that is more permanent and this can only be attained through a great cost. Death leads to a measure of life that we would otherwise never have. Fundamentally, death says that at some point in our existence, independent of time, we must shed this limited life and enter into unlimited life with Christ.

We see death through two aspects because of the limitations of our material existence. We cannot deny the horrific aspects of death. To do so would be lying to ourselves. But the overpowering reality of biological death must not obscure a wider vision of the work done for us by Christ. In a sense, it may be a blessing in disguise to have the two aspects of death present at the funeral service because this is an accurate portrayal of what we experience. Unfortunately, too often we get so overwhelmed by the horror of it that we forget or omit the glory that is there also. We must continually remember and have at the forefront of our belief and hope, the proclamation of the early Church. He is risen and through His Resurrection, death has been vanquished.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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