Why Do the Orthodox Pray for their Devout Dead?

I am sometimes asked why we Orthodox pray for our loved ones who have died and who were devout Orthodox Christians.  Are we afraid that they won’t somehow “make it”?  Do we think that by our prayers we can move them from hell into heaven?  In Protestant Evangelical circles our tradition of praying for our Christian dead makes no sense:  they believe that at death one either enters into hell because one is damned or into heaven because one is saved and there is nothing that anyone on earth can do about it.  Salvation consists of being saved in heaven and those saved in heaven do not need anything more—and especially not from us here on earth.  So why do we pray for them?

       One short answer is:  because Christians have always done so.  But here we must take care not to anachronistically read into the early Church’s prayer for their dead later views such as the western understanding of Purgatory, which did not reach its final form in the West until the 12th century.  The early Church’s practice of prayer for their devout dead was built upon a very different foundation.

       That practice appears in history very early.  Concern for the final fate of the dead can even be found in St. Paul, when he expressed concern for his departed friend Onesiphorus: “The Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains; but when he was in Rome, he eagerly searched for me and found me—the Lord grant to him to find mercy from the Lord on that day.”  It was more a wish than an actual prayer, but it revealed that Paul felt that his earthly concern for Onesiphorus could find an answer on the Last Day.

       Such concern would find expression in actual prayers in the days to come.  An epitaph of the bishop Abercius of Hierapolis (d. ca. 167) invites anyone “who understands and believes pray for Abercius”. By the time of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) prayer for the Christian dead had become such a staple of devotion that it had found a place in the anaphora, the Eucharistic prayer consecrating the bread and wine to become Christ’s Body and Blood. As Cyril said in his Mystagogical Catecheses explaining the Liturgy to the newly-baptized, “Then we commemorate also those who have fallen asleep…believing that this will be of the greatest benefit to the souls of those on whose behalf our supplication is offered in the presence of the holy, most dread Sacrifice [i.e. the Eucharist]”.

It was early understood that the Christian dead were with the Lord and were at peace.  To quote Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “The early Church lived in the quiet and joyful certitude that those who had fallen asleep in Christ were alive. Or, to quote another early formula, they dwell ‘where the light of God’s countenance shines on them.’” (from his The Liturgy of Death lectures).

       We see this confidence in some of the earliest of Christian witnesses—that of the funerary art of the catacombs where Christians often buried their dead.  To quote Schmemann again, “There the main and almost exclusive theme of that art is not death, nor even after-life, but rather …symbols of baptism…Baptism is the ‘death of death’… birth into the new life in Christ, the life in which death has no more power”.

Even more significant are the inscriptions and graffiti found on the graves of the Christians which read “ora pro nobis”—“pray for us”.  This request of the dead that they pray for the living was not confined to the martyrs or saints who had been canonized but was asked of all the Christian departed.  The distinction between the saint to whom prayer is made and the “average” departed Christian for whom prayer was made had not yet arisen—nor could it, given that all Christians alike shared in the glorious rest in Christ.  All Christians were saints, not just the martyrs. 

To quote Schememann one more time: “It is an accepted fact that the early Church knew nothing of our distinction between glorified or canonized saints  and ‘ordinary’ members of the Church…The setting apart of the bodies of the martyrs for special liturgical veneration was rooted therefore not in any specific opposition of holy to non-holy, but in the early Church’s faith that Christ appeared and was revealed in the martyr in a special way, bearing witness through the martyr to His own power and victory over death” (from his Introduction to Liturgical Theology). 

So, obviously the early church did not consider their devout dead as needing help from those still in via to reach salvation.  Why then did they (and we) pray for them?  In a word:  because we are all one body in Christ, united in an embrace of mutual prayer and intercession that not even death can break.  How could it, since death had been abolished by Christ’s death and resurrection?  All Christians pray for one another here on earth and we continue to do so after death.  The dead pray for us (hence the ora pro nobis graffiti carved on their tombs) and we pray for them.

We can see this more clearly when we transpose the whole debate from the heated arena of polemics to the quieter space of the cemetery where a loved one lies buried.  Imagine it:  your loved one—perhaps a child taken prematurely by cancer or an aged parent dying of heart failure—lies newly buried.  Tears accompanied their departure, both the tears of the dying for their leaving their dear family and the tears of the family in sorrow for their soon absence.  What could be more natural, human, and fitting than prayer for the departed?  We prayed for them while they lived on earth and will continue to do so after they have left us for the Kingdom.

We know that the departed will not forget their family but will pray for them at the throne of God.  The family for their part cannot forget their loved one and will commend them to God, asking that He wipe away their tears of sorrow and give them peace and rest and joy with Him in His Kingdom. 

This is the desire of every loving heart, the inevitable response of the Christian at the death of their loved ones. They are not praying that they will reach the Lord, because they know from the Gospel that to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).  They are praying because they want the Lord to dry the tears of their loved one and calm the sorrow of their departure.

And so He will:  we read concerning the devout dead in Revelation 7:15-17 which says that “they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them. They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat, for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.” 

That is what our prayers ask for when we pray for our devout dead.  In this life they laboured with us through a vale of tears, accumulating pain and wounds and sorrows.  At their departure we commend them to God, asking that He may soothe their earthly sorrow and pain and heal all their wounds.  We ask that Christ may grant them this rest “in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled away”, a place “where the light of God’s countenance shines on them”.  All grieving and loving hearts want this for their loved ones.  The Church assures them that their prayers for this will find an answer in the mercy of God.