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[Back to index of July/August articles] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith I’ve just heard that an old friend died today, a few weeks after his diagnosis of Hodgkins lymphoma, and I find myself too full of grief to write on the topic I had originally thought of. Just at this moment I find myself so grateful for the encouragement our church now gives to pray for the dead. What an amazing blessing it is to know that however hard the work is to let loved ones go, we have a channel of communication and intimacy still open to us! We can still express our love for the one who has gone from us through and in Christ. In the body of Christ, we are still united, and love can go on flowing back and forth, carried along on the currents of the Holy Spirit. Anglicans have not always enjoyed this freedom to pray for the dead. At the reformation the practice was stripped from the church’s worship. This was partly a reaction to the superstitious abuses associated with the medieval doctrine of Purgatory. Purgatory was conceived of as the place in which the dead supposedly served out the sentence for sins still outstanding—a sentence that prayers, indulgences and Masses for the dead were thought to shorten. Reformers rejected this idea in part because some held rigid beliefs about predestination—the idea that God had decreed in advance our fate in the life to come, a fate that no amount of prayers could possibly influence. I remember being touched by a passage from the diaries of the great Victorian Evangelical social reformer, the Earl of Shaftesbury, writing after his wife’s funeral, that from this day forward, to his utmost sorrow, he could never pray for her again. This was the prevailing spirituality. The dead were beyond the reach of prayer. The practice of praying for the dead was not revived on a large scale until the mid-19th century when the Tractarian movement rejuvenated Anglican theology and worship by tapping the rich sacramental and mystical traditions of the early church. For the first time in centuries, Anglicans were exposed to a new teaching on the nature of life after death. The theory that people are prepared for heaven by being first separated from the risen Christ in a place of suffering is absurd. The only means through which we can possibly be transformed after our death is through a Christ who continues to hold us in his heart. Only in the heart of Christ—where we have dwelt since baptism—can the departed continue to be changed into his image-from one degree of glory to another. We do not pray for the dead because they aren’t (yet) united to Christ. We pray for them to support them in their unfolding transformation. (God knows how radical is the change we will all need to undergo after death to be whole and true and free!) The great impetus that made prayer for the dead much more commonly accepted, at least by Anglicans in England, was the horrific slaughter of World War I. The tidal waves of grief that engulfed the population from the massive death toll washed away a lot of the resistance to prayers for the dead. Eventually, when it came time to produce new prayer books such as our current Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the practice of praying for the dead had been sufficiently normalized to allow for such prayers to be included in funeral services and in the Eucharist. I say normalized, but praying for the dead can have radical implications. Jesus told us to pray for our enemies. That must apply to praying for the dead. Once we start being radically inclusive, praying not only for our ‘loved ones’ but for strangers, for suicide bombers, for the criminals we execute and their victims, for anyone and everyone, we open ourselves to a controversial and radical spirituality of inclusive hope. Prayer for all the departed implies the possibility that those who die with the hardest of hearts can be melted in God’s presence with the help of the warmth of our faith, and those who die utterly broken and abject might be made whole in heaven with the help of even our tentative and wavering prayers of compassion. Prayer for all the dead is a radical act. It even has political implications. In the great national service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral after the Falklands War, Archbishop Robert Runcie took the gospel risk of including prayers for the fallen the Argentinean soldiers killed by British troops. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was beside herself with fury, and never forgave him for it. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [Back to index of July/August articles]
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