Memorial Services for the Reposed

Memorial Services

By Fr. Theodosios Martzouchos

"The dead man has not lost his place 
in the conscience and the mind of people, 
because he is absent from their eyes." 
— John Henry Newman

More or less, all of us have attended a Memorial Service for a relative or acquaintance. All of us have taken part in “remembrances of the dead.” We have all experienced the awkwardness of the mournful atmosphere, in which we do not know how to react or what to think. We have all felt uncomfortable, offering cold and indifferent condolences that we did not truly feel. Memorial Services, whether for acquaintances or relatives, have taken their place in the lives of Christians without the “why” of them being self-evidently understood and accepted.

In our own day especially, Memorial Services tend to become a psychologically comforting habit and at the same time a rational denial and objection. I do “something” for my loved one who has departed and remain with a sense of communication through the offering. At the same time my mind “protests” as to whether all this has any substantial usefulness, since when you die… everything seems futile and useless, just as indeed all material human things are useless for the dead.

What truly happens? What is a Memorial Service and why are Memorials needed?

1. The Theology of Matter

“It is appointed for men once to die, and after this comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27), teaches the Apostle Paul, making clear through his whole teaching that eternity is not something, but Someone; that when we die we will not go somewhere, but will meet Someone; that meeting Him is a “testing” — a “judgment” — of the quality of our person.

Hearing the word “judgment,” most people logically associate it with courts and decisions. They imagine a settling of accounts from a ledger of good and bad deeds. The earthly logic of dignity and outward appearance follows even into these new realities (as they imagine them), because we wish to forget that “there” there are no double data (some that appear and some that can be hidden), but all things are “naked and laid bare,” that is, uncovered and visible.

On the other hand, we easily forget the “jet-black ledgers” of the crucified thief’s life. We forget that the quality of the ten virgins was revealed when the Bridegroom came. We forget that the goats and the sheep were not made such by the Shepherd (Matt. 25). His presence simply revealed the difference — not because He loved some more, but because their personal realities made some His kin (according to the heart) and others strangers and unknown. Christ’s word in the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is a revealing acknowledgment, not an arbitrary classification.

The course of man and of creation is dynamic and continuous, and at the same time always looks toward and tends toward the coming of Christ, that is, the end of history (the eschaton — eschatology). All things proceed (“from glory to glory,” as in all biological life and even after death)[1] endlessly in a journey of participation and deeper relationship with the Life-giving Trinity, the Living God. “The perfection of the perfect is without end.” He alone is the unique Perfection and the true Life, the source of every life, He who brought all things into existence “out of nothing.” He alone is immortal. He is the Giver of life. Man “by nature” dies; the soul is immortal by grace and participation, and the whole human being becomes immortal after the reunion of body and soul through the Resurrection.

In any case, the state of man after death cannot be conceived statically; it is a dynamic continuation.

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (a name which means “God is my help”) confirms this (Luke 16:19–31). The rich man and Abraham meet as persons and converse. Of course, the patristic principle also applies here: “We must not examine all the details of the parables scrupulously” (Theophylact of Bulgaria), lest our discourse, reaching excess, “burden the hearers with unnecessary details” (Cyril of Alexandria). The discussion between Abraham and the rich man reveals the possibility of seeking better conditions (“that he may cool my tongue”). Abraham’s answer shows that “their choices were different and thus their conditions of dwelling were opposite, and each one ‘tasted’ what corresponded to his choice and manner of life” (Theophylact of Bulgaria).

2. “What must I do to be saved?”

A “pious” question, but also a universal anxiety.

A question that recurs many times in the Gospel texts and essentially exists in every human mind, seeking an answer concerning the purpose of human life. According to Christ, and consequently according to the teaching of the Church, you must be born again — be regenerated. An answer that made Nicodemos (a teacher of Israel) wonder how an old man can be born again (John 3:4).

Christ does not propose (nor to us) an emotional or psychological “rebirth,” much less a material-biological one, but something ontological, something real. To be born again means to acquire a new nature — the nature God gave us and which we refused.

We are born biologically into this world in a state of “original separation from God,” without possessing this new nature. [“The true Paradise is the Paradise we lost.”] Yet Christ invites us to trust Him and receive the “divine nature” through the Baptism of Regeneration. Until then we are biological beings, and God “is not our Father” involuntarily. It is clear that someone does not become a father simply because he exercises worldwide authority over the human race. A king or dictator may do such a thing, yet does not thereby become… a father!

What makes God Father? What He gives. The fathers of the human race give human life; the fathers of animals give animal life; God the Father gives Divine Life — what in theological language is called Grace. If you do not trust Him in order to be born again, if you do not believe, you will not be saved. This does not mean that “if your mind thinks wrong thoughts you will go to hell and die”! It means that if you refuse to accept God’s invitation, you will be spiritually barren, enclosed in your selfish self, and you will “give birth” to nothing. If you do not allow God to enter your soul, you will not have divine life within you. Then your oil will not suffice “to receive the Bridegroom,” and the manner of your life will have made you a “goat,” disturbed by the presence of the Shepherd’s love.

3. “Hades and Death”

Christ’s descent into Hades, which we celebrate triumphantly on Holy Saturday, does not allow us to forget the dead. They are the… majority, and Christ lovingly remembered them. Nor are we permitted to accept misinterpretations about a supposedly final condition of the dead (“for in Hades there is no repentance”),[2] while at the same time we proclaim loudly and majestically in the Creed: “…and He shall come again to judge the living and the dead.” If the condition of the dead were final and already judged, what further (and final) judgment would be needed for them?

If there did not remain for the dead the possibility to love or to reject Christ, why would Christ descend into Hades for three days? For Christ “all live,” and He acts with that reality in view. “In relation to the life-giving God, the basic characteristic of human life is not only repentance and obedience — voluntary, not forced — but also expectation” (N. Matsoukas).

From this freedom of the human soul, capable of choosing, the Church of God knows that the dead, though awaiting the completion of their existence through the Resurrection, are able to think and to decide. The “quality of disposition present in each person” determines, in a way not perceptible to us, the nature and quality of a person’s relationship with God. For this reason, the Church has always prayed for the repose of the souls of her departed members.

The existence of heaven and hell must be understood literally, not merely spiritually — just as we speak about God. Yet their nature can be understood only symbolically, just as knowledge of God can only be expressed through symbols. The Church knew that this repose varies according to the measure of one’s relationship with Christ, according to the Scriptural word: “star differs from star in glory” (1 Cor. 15:41).[3]

Christ descended into Hades. This descent does not define spatial or temporal conditions, but conditions of metaphysical existence. At death the hidden roots of life are stripped bare, and what remains to us is the “foliage and the trunk.” The soul lives in a real environment, with bonds to the material world and with self-consciousness, awaiting its perfection through the Resurrection.

For these dead — who, though dead, are members of the Church (the body of the Church is described as the body “of the living and the departed”) — and since God “is not God of the dead but of the living” (Matt. 22:32) and before God all live, the Church prays for them. She begins with the Funeral Service and continues with the Divine Liturgies and Memorial Services, and additionally with Trisagion prayers at the graves, for the “repose of their souls.”

For Christians who love Christ and believe in Him and await with joyful expectation His Resurrection, death and oblivion cannot prevail. The soul exists as essence and as energy — not only spiritual, but also in relation to the body.

In the Kingdom of God people may “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” yet Christians are united by the divine brotherly bond of adoption by God the Father through Christ, not by the biological conditions and habits of earthly life. We love now with earthly measures and capacities — “through a glass darkly,” before the “veil of our flesh” is torn (Heb. 10:20). Then, however, with the “greater than all” love of Christ, of which our Firstborn Brother will make us sharers and participants.

4. Concerning the Course of Man and His Soul

The soul is immaterial “in relation to us,” yet when compared with God it is found to be “dense and material” (St. John of Damascus). With His descent into Hades, Christ created a new dawn in the kingdom of the dead. After Christ’s Descent into Hades, death lost its “sting” (“O Hades, where is your sting?”, Paschal Catechetical Homily), and thus remaining among the dead no longer causes horror to Christians. Christ’s descent into Hades and His conquest of “the netherworld” made death not a loss but a gain, as the Apostle Paul teaches the Philippians (“I desire to depart and be with Christ,” Phil. 1:23) and the Corinthians (“we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” 2 Cor. 5:8).

The soul of the Christian is filled with the peace and joy of returning to the Father’s house, as it longed to do even while in the flesh. Now almost nothing hinders communion with Christ except the absence of the body. Therefore, the state of human beings in Hades before Christ’s descent was entirely different from what it became after His descent. Now it is different for those who believed in the Lord, different for those who did not believe and did not hope in Him — just as previously it was different for those who were not given opportunities to know Christ and to believe.

Consequently, there are various conditions and realities in the state of death. One may encounter there both a Paradise and a dark Hades, as the martyr Justin says in the Dialogue With Trypho: “…the souls of the saints do not go to death as those of sinners do, but they taste Paradise, although they are now together with all in Hades — yet not under the same conditions as the unjust.”

As C. S. Lewis strikingly describes in the preface to his book The Great Divorce:

"I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not. It is still 'either-or.' If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries.' In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven."

5. The… Liturgical Rites

Already from the Old Testament the Church of that time prayed for the dead. For the death of Saul and Jonathan a fast was offered. Nehemiah describes the fasting and confession of the people for the dead. In the Second Book of Maccabees a “sin-offering” is described (those particular dead had become a kind of idolaters), even with the request that they “be released from the sin.” And explaining the act it is written that this prayer was requested (even sending money to the Temple of Jerusalem) by their brave leader Judas, because he also “expected the resurrection of the dead, since otherwise prayer for the dead would be foolish nonsense” (2 Macc. 12:45).

The offering of the Eucharist on the “occasion” of a Memorial Service (third-day, ninth-day, fortieth-day) is an expression of the fact that the life of Christians, living and departed, is the Eucharist, since “the Blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from every sin” (1 John 1:7) and gives us life — not necessarily biologically but essentially.

On the third day (the third-day Memorial) the Church offers the Eucharist and prays for the departed in remembrance of the three-day Resurrection. It repeats the same on the ninth day, praying also to the angels (the nine ranks) and to the guardian angel for the departed. On the fortieth day after death, recalling the journey of the people of God in the desert and the corresponding prayer at the death of Moses, as well as Christ’s forty-day prayer, it again offers the Eucharist, without being bound in an absolute legalistic way to the precise number of days from death.

On the two Saturday of Souls of the year — the one before Meatfare Sunday and the one before Pentecost Sunday — the Church (especially at the second, praying on its knees) prays intensely and fervently for the repose of the souls of the departed, offering the Eucharist for all the dead, those who died in every manner, and of course for those who have no relative to pray for them. We say to Christ in our kneeling prayers:

“In this perfect and saving feast You deigned to accept supplications for the dead and to give us great hopes that the departed will be delivered from whatever grievous things torment them… and through the radiant angels will share in the life of the saints and in the blessedness of perfection, having obtained mercy and forgiveness and freedom and relief.”

This is the teaching and faith of the Church.

Blessedness is not a reward connected with a “proper” respectable social life, like a grade earned from attending a school class, but is life itself in its perfection. And punishment is not external but internal: the perfection of evil itself. We choose Heaven or Hell with each choice for good-truth or evil-falsehood.

The Church does not exhaust itself in describing routes of the soul (even though many such texts circulate among its members), knowing that the human soul is in God’s hands in the harbor of His Kingdom, in His rest. Every soul is endangered by its own content, not by Christ. The Church’s prayer for it is not an appeasement of the Merciful Father (Who has compassion and IS love) but a supplication that the soul be receptive to God’s mercy — that it not be so cramped in the egoism of self-infatuation that it “cannot see the beauty of God” and thus suffer.

Saint Gregory Palamas, truly an angelic teacher for our Church, clarifies fundamentally:

"The rational noetic souls of angels and humans (from their creation and by grace) have life as essence — that is, they live independently and are immortal. For humans, however, the soul exists not only as essence but also as energy, since it gives life to the body with which it is united. In this lies the difference from angelic souls which have no body. There is also a difference from the 'soul' of irrational animals, since in them the soul coincides with bodily life and dissolves together with the body.

Both angels and humans do not possess goodness as essence; rather their soul is receptive either to goodness or to the rejection of goodness. Thus angels and humans have a soul composed of life (as essence) and the quality of their disposition, which depends on their self-determination, that is, their freedom. Therefore we have good angels and evil angels; good (essentially, not merely behaviorally) humans and evil humans — angels and humans who wish to partake of the virtues of Christ, and angels and humans who turn their backs on Him.[4]

The evil angels are 'death-dealing' spirits, since they bring death to whoever obeys them. Yet despite this choice they remain immortal, because they do not lose life as essence. Deathliness is not essence but a fixed condition of separation from God. Analogously human reality also becomes such when it obeys this death-bearing inclination and conforms to it. In humans there is also the realm of bodily-material activity (either life-giving and creative or death-bringing and destructive). All these realities remain even after bodily death; only with death the soul loses its body-forming activity. A body without the soul is dead; a soul without the body is naked." (“Physical, Theological, Ethical, and Practical Chapters,” Philokalia, vol. 4, pp. 136–187, §30.)

6. Prayers and the “Offerings” for the Dead

The loving disposition of the living toward their departed leads them to the care “to do something” for the repose of the souls of their own people. Legitimate and natural. The first self-evident movement is prayer — prayer in the church during the services (Funeral–Memorials) but also privately, personal prayer with the intensity of anxious hope for a “result” for the beloved person, as well as prayer by analogy with the Gospel’s holy persistence![5]

The offering of kollyva (boiled wheat) is based on Christ’s teaching: “Unless a grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone” (John 12:24), which is a teaching of resurrection. Memorial Services (that is, the Divine Liturgies for the departed) are always accompanied by kollyva. Loving expressions of prayer for the dead — the vigil-lamp on the grave, that is, a prayerful reminder before the Cross (as also before the icons), incense, the lighting of candles — are expressions of prayerful concern for their state. It is concern about whether they are in conditions of comfort, joy, and repose or whether they suffer, self-confined in the selfish prison they may have built throughout their earthly life. Repose is not a… soothing bath, but the experience of essential joy born from the encounter with the beloved Christ.

On the other hand, the exhortation to offer almsgiving on behalf of the souls of the departed is an ancient Christian custom, grounded and right. Almsgiving is a sacrifice of love and therefore freedom from the cage of the egocentric self. Thus, when “seeing your brother you see the Lord your God” (as the Fathers teach), the offering ultimately becomes an offering to God! Does He need it? Not at all — we need it as substantial and practical love. Almsgiving therefore seeks to “warm the heart” of our departed in love toward God, so that the soul may… “cross the chasms” that perhaps separate it from Christ. Can such a thing happen? The experience of the Church answers: yes.

A mistaken “anxiety” is often expressed by theologians and preachers lest someone be delivered from hell (that is, separation from God), and they write:

“…we do not mean (by the Memorials) deliverance from the sufferings of Hades and transfer from hell into Paradise, but only a small relief and slight help…!!”

Such narrow-hearted theologies (as though if a sinner went to Paradise he would take our ‘place’) are… accountable and must answer us regarding the kind of relief and the measure of the help…!!

Patristic citations (usually fragmentary and one-sided, though sometimes substantial — e.g., the discourse of Saint John of Damascus, On Those Who Died in Faith) of course do not establish something indisputable… The Church, full of the love of God, prays for the participation of its departed members in the joy of the Kingdom of God and for the inclusion of the departed among those who behold the Face of Christ not “in a mirror,” but directly. It prays for the “recording” of the reposed in the Book of Life — among the citizens of the Land of the Living. In the Funeral Service all the above are emphasized, as well as the hope for the possibility of… “unworthy” salvation, since in the penultimate troparion we say:

“…but I ask all and entreat all to pray unceasingly for me to Christ God, that I not be ranked, because of my sins, in the place of torment, but that He rank me where the light of life is.”

Each person, of course, will be judged according to the measure he himself has applied toward his neighbor. People are “received” into the Kingdom or “condemned” to eternal punishment according to the love or indifference they have shown to others. With these criteria, the death of Christ is the moment at which the world is judged. Indeed, the judgment begins when the Father sends His Son into the world. From the moment Jesus appears in the world, the end times are inaugurated. The eschatological judgment is already being realized, even though the glorious return of Christ must still be awaited for its perfect fulfillment. The Father, of course, does not send Him to condemn the world; rather He comes to save the world. Yet depending on each person’s stance toward Him, the Judgment becomes immediate: whoever believes will not be judged; whoever does not believe has already been judged because he rejected the light (John 3:18).

Judgment is more a revelation of the secret of the human heart than a divine verdict. Those whose deeds are evil prefer darkness to light, and God simply respects their choice of blindness — these self-satisfied people who boast that they see clearly. But to the others Jesus comes to heal their eyes, so that “doing the truth” they may come to the light (John 3:21). The final judgment, therefore, will do nothing other than bring to light this separation that already takes place secretly in hearts. Then, “when our life is revealed” (Col. 3:4), either you trust Him, follow Him, and change your heart — and with the help of the brothers in the world who pray and offer the bloodless sacrifice for you you have or gain the possibility of participation in the “boundless delight of those who behold the light of the face of Christ” — or you remain in the misery of self-enclosure (“with the doors shut,” J.P. Sartre), trusting only yourself, blaming others as responsible for your suffering, and ultimately not leaving this prison of misery even though “the doors were opened” by Christ.

Prayer for the dead, therefore, is anxiety, supplication, and entreaty for the freedom of the hearts of our loved ones from the self-satisfied blindness that leads to the loneliness of hell. It is a cry of supplication for the repetition, for our own people, of the story of the thief.

“God does not punish anyone; rather each person makes himself receptive or not to participation in the uncreated energies of God. Participation is happiness (Paradise) and non-participation is misery (hell). God gives even the devil this good possibility always, but he does not wish to partake” (John of Damascus, Against the Manichaeans). The same Saint says: “As darkness disappears with the coming of light, so corruption is abolished by the ‘invasion’ of life brought by Christ, and all are vivified. Corruption remains only in the corrupter” (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith).

In the end, “only death dies.”

Notes:
 

1. "Glory" is a word that today implies psychological anxieties of egotistical self-projection and serves as a “tool” and goal for social advancement. “Many have hated wealth; no one glory,” says — with proverbial wisdom — a saying. Yet the content of the word on the lips of Christ and the Church is entirely different. Glory does not mean publicity, but real value measured by its… weight (e.g., the apostolic remark: “an eternal weight of glory works for us,” 2 Cor. 4:17). In the Old Testament we have manifestations of the Glory of God. This Glory is an unquenchable fire, a holiness that reveals the impurity of the creature; yet its triumph is not to destroy but to purify, and its desire is to flood the earth, according to Isaiah: “Arise, shine, O Jerusalem, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you” (Is. 60:1). The glory of Christ is the Cross — that is, sacrifice — that is, the “forgetting” of oneself. Such a spiritual course on the part of man leads from glory to glory, since awareness places the human being in sacrificial love even unto the Cross.

2. There is an obvious influence from ancient Greek pagan “concepts,” according to which Hades had four regions and, upon dying, a person went to a court (judges: Rhadamanthys, Minos, Aeacus) that decided definitively whether the dead would end up in Tartarus, in Purgatory, or in the Elysian Fields — the so-called Isle of the Blessed.

These have nothing in common with the Church’s faith that the Christian, in dying, returns to the house of his Father — that the Father is always Father, and that unfortunately we, “the children,” often fail to recognize Him and do not accept His love, and thus, by distancing ourselves, we suffer. ↩︎

3. See note 1, p. 2.

4. “Today, of course, the distinction between a good and a bad person has become blurred in content. People now choose beliefs according to how much they help them rather than how true they are. Foolish preachers, emphasizing the usefulness of Christianity for individuals and society, have reduced it to… a home remedy” (C. S. Lewis). Yet participation in the goodness of God aims to form… gods (“I said, you are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High,” Ps. 81), not perfectionist scouts — consistent… tidy… and respectable! ↩︎

5. 'Imagine,’ He said to them, ‘one of you going at midnight to his friend’s house and saying: “Friend, lend me three loaves, because a traveling friend has come to my house and I have nothing to set before him.” And he answers from inside: “Do not trouble me; the door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.” It is obvious that even if he will not help him because of friendship, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him whatever he needs.’” (Luke 11:5–8)

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.