Praying for the Dead

Death does not end our communion with those we love. "Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's," St. Paul writes; Christ "is Lord both of the dead and living." The departed are not gone, only unseen, and the Church has prayed for them from the beginning. The practice rests on the conviction that our prayers, joined to Christ's mercy, genuinely help them — while leaving the manner of that help in God's hands. On the doctrine itself, and why Orthodoxy prays for the dead without the Western idea of a purgatory to be satisfied, see prayers-for-the-departed and the-particular-judgment.

The instinct is old. The Second Book of Maccabees calls it "an holy and good thought" to pray for the dead that they may be "delivered from sin" (2 Maccabees 12:45), and St. Paul seems to pray for the departed Onesiphorus, "the Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day." St. John Chrysostom took the Church's practice for granted, insisting that its remembrance of the departed was apostolic in origin.

Prayer for the dead begins in the home. Their names are kept on a commemoration list and read at daily prayers with a petition for their repose. Many families read the Psalter for the departed, especially in the days just after a death, and keep the person's icon or photograph in view. The refrain "Memory eternal" — the Church's prayer that God, not merely we, remember the departed forever — belongs to this home devotion as much as to the funeral.

Alms are part of it too. From ancient times Christians have given to the poor in memory of the dead, so that a work of mercy is offered in their name. Some families prepare koliva, a dish of boiled wheat and honey blessed at memorials, its grains recalling Christ's words that the seed must die to bear fruit. None of this is grim; it is love continuing to act.

The Church's fullest prayer for the departed is the Divine Liturgy itself, where their names are read at the Proskomedia and particles offered for them. Beyond this the Church serves memorial offices: the panikhida (also called a parastas in its longer form), a short, beautiful service of intercession for one or more of the departed, which families request on the day of death and at anniversaries (panikhida-memorial-service). By long custom special remembrance is made on the third, ninth, and fortieth days after death and yearly thereafter (memory-eternal-memorial-doctrine).

The Church also sets aside whole days for the departed. The Memorial (Soul) Saturdays, scattered through the year and clustered around Great Lent, are days when the whole Church prays together for all the dead — the forgotten, the unbaptized-into-our-memory, those with no one left to name them. Home and church work together: what the family carries in its list, the Church lifts up at the altar.