Praying with & for the Departed?

In a previous post, we saw that even those who want to recapture the centrality of the hope of the resurrection of the body and the restoration of all things, still hold that we can expect that those who die while we await the Day of Lord and the 'redemption of our bodies'  (Romans 8) experience some conscious existence in God's presence, however incomplete. This has been the view of the vast majority of Christians through the ages.

What is the relationship between those who have died and those still living in the flesh? Does it make sense to pray for the dead? To ask the dead to pray for us?

Here are some thoughts from four Anglicans:

N. T. Wright:

"I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should–not that they should get out of purgatory but that that they will be refreshed and filled with God's joy sand peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love before God?

I do not, however, find in the New Testament or in the earliest Church fathers any suggestion that those at present in heaven or (if you prefer) paradise are actively engaged in praying for those of us in the present life. Nor do I find any suggestion that Christians who are still alive should pray to the saints to intercede to the Father on their behalf."
(Surprised by Hope, p. 172)

C. S. Lewis disagrees with Wright on asking for the prayers of the dead:

"There is clearly a theological defense for it; if you can ask for the prayers of the living, why should you not ask for the prayers of the dead? There is clearly also a great danger. In some popular practice we see it leading off into an infinitely silly picture of Heaven as an earthly court where applicants will be wise to pull the right wires, discover the best “channels,” and attach themselves to the most influential pressure groups. But I have nothing to do with all this. I am not thinking of adopting the practice myself; and who am I to judge the practice of others?

The consoling thing is that while Christendom is divided about the rationality, and even the lawfulness, of praying to the saints, we are all agreed about praying with them. “With angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” One always accepted this ‘with’ theoretically. But it is quite different when one brings it into consciousness at an appropriate moment and wills the association of one’s own little twitter with the voices of the great saints and (we hope) of our own dear dead. They may drown some of its uglier qualities and set off any tiny value it has.

You may say that the distinction between the communion of the saints as I find it in that act and full-fledged prayer to saints is not, after all, very great."
(Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, p. 15-16)

John Polkinghorne:

"If the souls awaiting the final resurrection are held in the mind of God, as we have suggested, then ‘in the Lord’ there will surely be a mediated relationship between the living and the dead. One of the most natural ways in which to express this relationship will be through prayer. No doubt, those who are ‘in Christ’ are wholly within God’s loving care and protection, but we should not argue that this makes it unnecessary or inappropriate for us to pray for them. After all, the same is as true of those among the living who are committed to Christ, as it is of the departed. Many arguments alleged against praying for the dead seem, on the face of it, to apply equally to praying for the living."
(The God of Hope and the End of the World, p. 110)

Helen Oppenheimer: 

"Surely there is no need to assume such a fixity in Heaven that prayer for the dead is simply ruled out. People naturally pray for their nearest and dearest. And, if they find it still natural to go on praying for them when they have died, it is no less than cruel to require them to stop. Dead people are in God’s hands as they were when they were alive. God will do his best for them forever. We cannot improve upon what God will do. But, surely we may be allowed to associate ourselves with it, associate ourselves with that blessing. That is what it could mean to be human means of grace. Perhaps we might even find that we had been allowed to give some kind of particular flavor of our own to the limitless blessings of God. Prayer for the living is surely less puzzling seen in this way, and it seems quite promising to think like this of prayer for the dead, too.”

(The Hope of Heaven: What Happens When We Die?)

The Book of Common Prayer assumes prayers for the dead as part of our worship:

“We commend to your mercy all who have died; that your will for them may be fulfilled. And, we pray that we may share with all your saints in your eternal kingdom.”
(Prayers of the People, Form IV)

Father of all, we pray to you for those we love, but see no longer: Grant them your peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and, in your loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of your perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 504)

Questions Re: Between Death & Resurrection

My friend, LaVonne, responded in a Facebook message to my last post, Between Death and Resurrection, with some questions. With her permission, I'm posting her queries and my response.

From LaVonne:

Just read your "Into the Expectation"

Good questions all. The church's tradition isn't necessarily founded on Scripture, of course. If the Genesis man became a living soul when the dust of the earth was animated by the breath of God, it seems odd that the living soul would continue minus the dust. Maybe we all return to God in a Hindu sense until the resurrection - all part of some oversoul that will re-individualize when we get our resurrection bodies.

As for praying to the dead - I don't see much harm in it; I just don't think many of the dead are listening. First, because only a few were assumed into heaven body and soul and so I'm guessing they're asleep. Second, because even if they're awake, what makes us think they're wanting to spend all their time reading emails from earth? Is that what you'd want to do until the Last Judgment mercifully intervenes? Me neither.

Oh, and then there's the possibility that some of the dead are spending their time in Purgatory or even Hell - are they conscious there too? And if not, will the poor sods in hell eventually get a resurrection body - splendid, glorious, imperishable, immortal - so God can watch them writhe and holler forever? Or will they never have to worry about their bodies again, which means they probably won't have to worry about consciousness either, which means they'll sleep through hell for all eternity?

And another question: let's say my body is messing me up. Maybe I have Alzheimer's, or maybe I'm in a coma. My brain is defective, so I am no longer entirely conscious. OK, then my brain just plain quits. I die. Why would consciousness suddenly return? Where has it been while I was comatose? Just wondering...

My Response:

These are all good points/questions. As I said in an earlier post, any 'answer' is necessarily speculative. We do well to hold anything we think or say about this (and much else about God) lightly and with humble circumspection - if not a sort of holy agnosticism. But, it does not seem adequate or edifying to simply shrug and say 'Who knows?' And we have been given hints and glimpses through scripture and tradition. So . . .

As for Genesis 2, I guess the counter question might be, 'Where does the breath that was me in all my peculiar particularity go when I die?' If I return to God in the Hindu sense, does God then recreate new individuals at the resurrection? Or will my particular personality be kept and cherished in God's memory until then? And if the latter, the question remains, 'Might that include some sort of consciousness?'

As for praying to or for the dead, that seems potentially not all that different from doing the same with the living. Being bombarded by bothersome emails while awaiting the Resurrection does not sound restful or pleasant -- kind of humorous, though. But, maybe it would not be onerous. Held in God's memory/presence, might we know and experience such communion and delight of love that an ongoing relationship with the living would be a joy? [This is the intended topic of my next post]

Purgatory: Perhaps it is all purgative between now and the Resurrection. I am a hopeful universalist, but if it is possible to finally and/or eternally refuse the invitation to the Party, I suspect the result is something more like Sheol or Gollum, self-isolated in a dark cave at the heart of the mountain, than a literal lake of fire or some other torture chamber where persons 'writhe and holler forever.' And I doubt God ever gives up even on those who hold out.

The fact is, our bodies - and particularly the mindful meat in our skulls - can be and are messed up - some more profoundly than others. That's why I think we need to emphasize that salvation includes healing as well as forgiveness. More particularly, my hope is that God does not forget who I am even if I have lost all sense of who I am. Or never had the chance to live into who I might have been. Or was so messed up from the get-go (profound mental illness or mental deficiency) that I never experienced anything like a whole personality. Our ultimate hope is in the resurrected wholeness of body, mind, spirit, and soul. I expect that whatever our existence is like between our deaths and the resurrection it will be even more of a foretaste of that wholeness than we have experienced by the grace of God in this life.

Between Death and Resurrection?

Continuing last week's reflection about the hope of the resurrection of the dead/body:

For Christians, the resurrected body has always been (officially if not in popular imagination) an integral aspect of our ultimate expectation. This creates a challenge to some popular and rather sentimentalized notions of life after death. Affirming that hope raises other questions such as:

Can we expect any conscious existence between our individual deaths and the Resurrection of the dead/body?

There have been those who have argued that the answer to that question is 'no.' In that case, those who have died are dead - period - until the Day of Resurrection at which point we will be restored for judgment and eternity.

Is it possible, though, even if we restore the centrality of  the hope of resurrection in place of popular images of heaven, to expect some conscious existence between our physical death and our resurrection?

Certainly that has been the majority view of the Church through the ages, including the representatives in the post referenced above. Even though they believed that whatever intervening existence those who have died might have is incomplete until the restoration of resurrection of the body, Anthony, Ephrem, and Dante each believed the dead had some conscious existence. 

We saw in the last post that physicist/theologian, John Polkinghorne holds to an idea of a conscious existence of the dead,'held in the divine memory.'

N. T. Wright, who is one who has been reclaiming the centrality of resurrection hope also thinks so,

All the Christian departed are in essentially the same state, that of restful happiness. Though this is sometimes described as sleep, we shouldn’t take this to mean that it is a state of unconsciousness. Had Paul thought that, I very much doubt that he would have described life immediately after death as “being with Christ, which is far better.” Rather, sleep here means that the body is asleep in the sense of dead while the real person–however we want to describe him or her–continues.

This state is not, clearly, the final destiny for which the Christian dead are bound, which is as we have seen, the bodily resurrection. But it is a state in which the dead are held firmly within the conscious love of God and the conscious presence of Jesus Christ while they await that day. There is no reason why this state should not be called heaven, though we must note once more how interesting it is that the New Testament routinely doesn’t call it that and uses the word heaven in other ways. (Surprised by Hope, p. 171-172)

Whether we are merely dead (and thus with no consciousness) until the resurrection or we have some conscious existence in the meantime, our next awareness after dying will be coming face to face with Jesus.

While I am persuaded that we do well to remember that our ultimate hope is the fullness of our restoration at the resurrection of the body, I am inclined to agree with the tradition that there is some conscious existence of the dead, however incomplete, between now and then.  But, then, other questions arise:

What is the relationship between those who have died and those still living in the flesh? Does it make sense to pray for the dead? To ask the dead to pray for us?

The Hope of Resurrection of the Dead/Body

When Christians gather for worship they usually say one of two classic affirmations of faith.

They either say the Nicene Creed which includes the line,

"[We believe] in the resurrection of the dead"

or they say the Apostles' Creed which includes the line,

"[I believe] in the resurrection of the body"
 

Thus Christians regularly affirm that our bodies matter – God created them and declared them good after all – and that we expect to be embodied beyond death.

In spite of these affirmations, many contemporary Christians have inculcated a rather gnostic view of of the body and material reality in general as unimportant if not somehow bad. This view leads to an expectation of life after death in which an immortal, immaterial soul escapes the dead body and goes directly to its eternal fate in the spirit-realms of either Heaven or Hell (or maybe Purgatory).

This was driven home to me recently in a conversation with someone who has been a lifelong Christian with consistent church attendance, involvement, and leadership. Despite over 70 years in the church, this Christian spoke of the body as something insignificant that we leave behind when we die. 

I suspect this is not an uncommon view. But, such a view makes little sense in light of the belief the Church and her members affirm in the creeds represented in the lines above, which in turn reflects a more complete biblical view of the indispensableness of the body for our ultimate hope.  This spiritualizing tendency undervalues the goodness of our bodies as creations of God. It also misses the wonder and mystery of the sanctification of embodied life represented in the Incarnation and Ascension. And it negates the aspect of hope contained in the creeds that we await the fullness of  the resurrectioon and restoration not just of our bodies but of new creation at the end of history.

Some contemporary theologians have been attempting to correct this over-spiritualized view of our hope. One of these is Bishop N. T.Wright (see for example Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop or, for a longer, but still accessible treatment, see Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church).

I want to point out that what Wright and others are advocating is not some new teaching. It is the classic Christian understanding that the soul - whatever it is and whether or not it can be separated from the body at all - is incomplete without the body. Thus, the ultimate Christian hope is not that our disembodied souls might enjoy eternal life relieved of our bodies in a spiritual heaven, but that at the Last Day, there will be Resurrection, Judgment, and Life Everlasting as transfigured embodied persons in a restored transfigured New Creation.

Here are some examples:

St. Anthony the Great (ca. 251–356):

God teaches us to keep the body in order–the whole of it, from head to foot; eyes–to look with purity; ears–to listen in peace (or to peaceful things) and not to take pleasure in gossip, slander, and criticism; tongue–to say only what is good, weighing every word, and allowing nothing impure or passionate [passion is a technical term of the early church referring to sinful agitations of the spirit, e.g., anger, envy, greed, lust, etc.] to become mixed with its speech; hands–to be moved primarily for lifting up in prayer and for acts of mercy and generosity; stomach–to be kept within suitable bounds in food and drink, allowing only as much as is needful to support the body, not letting lust and gluttony lead it beyond that measure; feet–to walk righteously, according to the will of God, aiming at the service of good deeds. In this way the whole of the body becomes accustomed to every good and, submitting to the power of the Holy Spirit, gradually changes, so that in the end it begins to participate, in a certain measure, in the qualities of the spiritual body, which it is to receive at the resurrection of the just.

– Directions on Life in Christ, Epistle I. 20 in Early Fathers from the Philokalia

St. Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306 – 373) in Hymns on Paradise writes:

The soul cannot

have perception of Paradise

without its mate, the body,

its instrument and lyre.

- Hymn VIII.2

Though the soul exists

of itself and for itself,

yet without its companion

it lacks true existence;

it fully resembles an embryo

still in the womb,

whose existence is as yet

bereft of word or thought.

- Hymn VIII.5

That blessed abode

is in no way deficient,

for that place is complete and perfected

in every way,

and the soul cannot

enter there alone,

for is such a state it is in everything

deficient–

in sensation and consciousness;

but on the day of Resurrection

the body, with all its senses,

will enter in as well, one it has been made perfect.

- Hymn VIII. 7

Thus in the delightful mansions

on the border of Paradise

do the souls of the just

and righteous reside

awaiting there

the bodies they love,

so that, at the opening

of the Garden’s gate,

both bodies and souls might proclaim,

amidst Hosannas,

“Blessed is He who has brought Adam from Sheol

And returned him to Paradise in the company of

Many.”

- Hymn VIII. 11

A hundred times finer

and more subtle

are the bodies of the righteous

when they are risen at the Resurrection:

they resemble the mind

which is able,

if it so wills, to stretch out and expand,

or, should it wish, to contract and shrink;

if it shrinks it is in some place,

if it expands, it is in every place.

- Hymn V. 8

Even Dante (c1265–1321), who Bishop Wright takes to task, in his delightful and mostly spiritualized vision of Paradise, retains as essential the hope of the resurrection of the body. From within a circle of dancing light, the soul of Solomon explains,

'Long as the joyous feast of Paradise

shall last, so long our burning love

shall clothe us in the radiance you see.

Our brilliance is in ratio to our love,

our ardor to our vision, and our vision

to the degree of grace vouchafed to us.

When our flesh sanctified and glorified,

shall clothe our souls once more, our person then

will be more pleasing since it is complete;

wherefore, the light generously bestowed

on us by the Supreme Good, is increased --

the light of glory that show Him to us.

It follows, then, that vision must increase,

as must the ardor kindled by the vision,

as must the radiance the ardor gives.

But as a coal burns white in its own fire,

whose inner glow outshines its outer flame

so that its form is clearly visible,

so this effulgence that envelops us now

will be surpassed in brilliance by the flesh

that for so long has lain beneath the ground;

Nor will such light be difficult to bear,

the organs of our bodies will be strengthened

and ready for whatever gives us joy.'

- Paradiso, Canto XIV, Lines 37-60

For Christians, the resurrected body has always been (officially if not in popular imagination) an integral aspect of our ultimate expectation. But affirming that raises other questions such as:

How do bodies that have turned to dust and whose atoms have been scattered and shared by other bodies get resurrected?

Can we expect any conscious existence between our individual deaths and the Resurrection of the dead/body?