We’ve been doing this since the very beginning, honoring and praying for the dead.

All four gospels commend Joseph of Arimathea, for example, for the care he gave to the body of Jesus and for the courage it took to ask Pilate for the corpse.[1] In the early centuries of persecution, enemies of the Church knew it would be particularly offensive if they destroyed the bodies of martyrs, preventing thereby Christians’ dangerous devotions paid toward their heroic dead. The bodies of the martyrs of Lyons in the second century, for instance, were left exposed six days to rot before being burned and “reduced to ashes” and dumped into the river—by “vicious men” the text says—all so that Christians “might have no hope in the resurrection.”[2]

The whole vast landscape of early Christian spirituality is full of the tombs of martyrs and saints and of the ordinary faithful. The Christian grave was, in ancient thought, the intersection of heaven and earth, a place of devotion, prayer, and spiritual union; this because from the very beginning, Christians believed in the power and communion of prayer—a power and communion which was neither dissolved nor broken by death.

At the Christian grave, the living prayed for the departed; and it was firmly believed, the holy ones, the dead and sanctified, prayed for the living. This was unquestioned belief and devotion. By the fifth century, St. Augustine, standing firmly on ancient spiritual wisdom, was adamant that these were no “empty motions of religious and faithful minds, which take this care for their deceased friends.” Rather, to pray and care for the dead was the good work of Christian people. “Not small is the authority…of the whole Church,” he said, “that in the prayers of the priest which are offered to the Lord God at His altar, the Commendation of the dead hath also its place”[3] We’ve been doing this since the beginning, as I said, praying for the dead as we do this day.

But what is going on when we pray for the departed? St. Thomas helps us here. We pray for the dead, he says in substance, because we love them and because love is efficacious. The Church, St. Thomas taught, was held together by love, “the bond uniting the members of the Church;” and a bond of love implies some form of sharing, some form of communication. And since love never ends, but survives even death, then the living may still share in a communion of love with the dead. Praying and doing good works on behalf of the dead, he taught, is simply the way the Church of the living loves the Church of the faithful departed—a love that does indeed “avail for the diminution of punishment” for the souls in purgatory.[4] This is quite simply the teaching of the Church. The entire body of the faithful, living and dead, comprise (to quote St. Paul VI) “a supernatural solidarity.” The living and the dead, he said, are connected by a “perennial link of charity;” and so therefore, every member of Christ’s body enjoy the spiritual goods of the Church, the faithful departed share in the spiritual goods of the Church just as we share our goods with each other on earth. We share the grace of Christ with each other until our love is perfected, until we become perfectly “a single mystical person.”[5] What are we doing then when we pray for the faithful departed? We’re tightening the very bonds, the glue, the mortar, the connecting links of the Church. We readily acknowledge that it’s a sin to neglect the brother or sister we see with our physical eyes; we must see also, therefore, that it’s a sin to neglect the brother or sister we see only in our spiritual memory. To pray for the dead is to love the whole Church, not just the living part of the Church.

It’s helpful, then, to think of our prayers for the dead in terms of love. But this doesn’t answer all our questions, nor does it silence our critics. Love is one thing, someone might argue. But that’s different from the dead receiving a benefit from our prayers. How is it that our prayers actually help the dead?

It’s helpful at this point to think of what we mean when we talk about “remembering.” For St. Thomas, “the dead live in the memory of the living.”[6] Memory in the Christian tradition is, simply speaking, a place of personal and divine discovery as well as a place of communion. Memory is an activity, a sense, that not only recalls events and persons of the past; it is a sense that in a certain way makes the past present. Memory brings the past to life, so to speak, making past persons and events in a sense real. To remember something, for example, is to begin to act upon what you remember or to treat what you remember as if it’s something real and relevant in the present. This makes sense if we look at ordinary speech. When a long-suffering woman, for example, points to her wedding ring and says to her wayward husband, “Remember what you said on our wedding day,” she is not asking him simply to recall a past event, academically as it were. Rather, she’s asking him to remember the vows he made in the past and make them real in the present. She’s asking him to be faithful. Or, when a father teaches his son about responsibility, saying to him, “Remember you told Mr. Smith you’d cut his lawn,” he’s asking his son to act upon the promises he made in the past. When we ask someone to “remember” something, often we’re asking that person to act in the present, not simply recall something for the sake of recalling it. Memory is something used to motivate and enliven; it’s a catalyst of sorts.

And the thing is God “remembers” like this too. God “remembered” Rachel and Hannah, scripture says, giving them the gift of children.[7] When Israel called upon God either to save or spare them, they would beg God to “remember the covenant” or to “remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”[8] To ask God to “remember” was to pray that God would act, that he would make the promises of the covenant come alive. Israelites too were obliged to “remember” the covenant. Every year at the harvest, the faithful Israelite was to bring his gift to the priest, reciting as he made his offering, “My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt,” recalling the saving Exodus in order to enliven within his soul the virtues of a Hebrew pilgrim.[9] In the New Testament as well when Paul asked his fellow Christians to “remember” the poor and those in prison, he was exhorting them to action and not just recollection. “Remembering” in the Bible is a powerful thing. It makes ancient covenants new again. In enlivens and activates the holiness of God and the devotion of his people.

This, then, gives us some sense of what Jesus meant when he said, “do this in memory of me.”[10] He was not, as we can see in light of the rest of scripture, speaking of a mere memorial. When we celebrate the Eucharist, we’re celebrating something real, encountering real presence. Our Eucharist is no simple recollection of the words and gestures of Jesus. It is a bringing-into-the-present the true body, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. Like Jews and Christians of millennia past, when we ask God to “remember,” something powerful happens, something real and alive. The past comes present and God dwells with all his people across space and time.

So, what does this teach us about praying for the dead? Remember what St. Thomas said: “the dead live in the memory of the living.”[11] We know better now what he meant by this. We know why St. Monica said to her son St. Augustine, “Lay this body anywhere, and take no trouble over it. One thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be.”[12] To remember our beloved dead in prayer—prayer which is a type of love—we draw near to them in the gift of the communion of God, a communion that keeps us all.

This is how we love those who have died and who have gone before us. We pray for those long dead, those who are but faint in our memory. We pray for those we’ve just lost, those for whom our hearts still ache in tender pain. We pray for those we’ve never known, the lonely and those who have no one to pray for them. We remember them all. We love them all. This is all we know to do, we Christians, we believers in heaven. Come, friends, let us pray for the souls of those who have died. Amen.

[1] Mark 15:42-47

[2] The Martyr Act of Lyons 1.62-63

[3] Augustine, On Care to Be Had for the Dead 1,3

[4] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Supp. 71.2

[5] Paul VI, Indulgentarium Doctrina 2.4-5

[6] Ibid.

[7] Genesis 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:19-20

[8] E.g., Ezekiel 16:60-63; Deuteronomy 9:27

[9] Deuteronomy 26:5

[10] Luke 22:19

[11] Ibid.

[12] Augustine, Confessions 11.27

© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield