Memorial services in the Orthodox Church
It has not pleased God to reveal to us the secrets of the next world, and hence, His "holy men", the writers of the Bible (2 Pet 1:21), would not write by their own imagination to satisfy human curiosity; therefore, their writings bear the seriousness of Gods inspiration, and thereby absolute trustworthiness. The life of the souls in the other world is described in the Bible in parables and characters, the descriptions of which are accepted by our Church as standing for realities (Luke 16:22; Matt 22:13; I Cor 13:12; Heb 12:22; Rev 2:10, 3:5, 21:8; etc). The souls of the departed, from their death to their Final Judgment, live in an intermediate state. In other words, if they had lived according to the will of God, their souls foretaste the Joys of Paradise; if they had deliberately set themselves against the will of God and their lives ended in sin and unrepentance, their souls foretaste the misery of Hell. Their Joy or punishment shall have its perfect realisation at the Last Judgement after the resurrection of the dead, when their nature will be restored to its integrity (John 5:29). In this intermediate state, the disembodied souls retain a conscious existence. The term "sleep" used instead of death in the Orthodox Church, applies to the body rather than to the soul. We may rather expect a quickening of the spiritual powers of memory, thought and affection and an intensifying of their operations, when released from the burden of the flesh (Luke 16:22-25). The departed have not forgotten us, nor are they indifferent to us. Those who have pleased God with their holy life, the Saints, pray for us; the rest need our prayers; it is "a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin" (11 Maccabees 12:45). The prayers for the departed are as ancient as the Christian Church. Prayers for a merciful Judgment at the Last Day, have the sanction of the early Liturgies, of which the first is that of St James, the Lord's brother. Although we read in the Bible that there are sins for which "there is no forgiveness, either in this world or in the world to come" (Matt 12:32), it is our brotherly duty and obligation to pray for the forgiveness of the departed. Our prayers can help those who repented even shortly before their death; not those who committed suicide (or euthanasia) or those who of their own free will rejected the love of God and ignored His Justice to the end of their life. However, as we do not know what is going on in one's mind, while living or dying, we must pray for the souls of all departed. Therefore, our Church offers prayers for them at their funerals and burials and over their graves, but especially the Church offers the Bloodless Sacrifice for the repose of the departed. For the same purpose, we perform the Memorial Services on the third, ninth and the 40th day, as well as on the anniversary of one's death and on the Saturday dedicated to the souls (Psychosavata), preparing boiled wheat (kollyva) for these Services. The kollyva represent the souls of the departed (John 12:24). At the end of the Liturgy, special hymns and prayers are offered over them for the repose of the departed. These memorial services cannot be replaced by donations or similar Pious acts. Our prayers for the souls of the departed are expressions of the brotherly unity of the living and the dead, aiming to influence the All-Merciful God to show mercy to them. by Fr Nicholas M. Elias The funeral service, although not considered as specifically sacramental, is a special liturgical rite. The Church has special prayers for those who have "fallen asleep in the Lord". When a person dies, the Church serves a special vigil over the lifeless body, called traditionally the Parastasis or Panikhida, both of which mean a "watch" or an "all-night vigil". The funeral vigil has the basic form of Matins. It begins with the normal Trisagion Prayers and the chanting of Psalm 91, followed by the special Great Litany for the dead. Alleluia replaces God is the Lord, as in Great Lent, and leads into the singing of the funeral Troparion. The troparion and the kontakion of the dead, as all hymns of the funeral vigil, meditate on the tragedy of death and the mercy of God, and petition eternal life for the person who is fallen asleep.
Psalm 119, the verbal icon of the righteous man who has total trust in God and total devotion and love for his Divine Law, the verbal icon of Jesus Christ, is chanted over the departed, with its praises and supplications for life in God. It is this same psalm which is chanted over the tomb of Christ on Great Friday. It is the psalm which sings of the victory of righteousness and life over wickedness and death.
This psalm together with the verses and prayers that go with it, the canon hymns of the service, and the special funeral songs of St John of Damascus all are a meditation on life and death. They are, in the context of the new life of the Risen Christ who reigns in the Church, a lesson of serious instruction for those who are immune to the full tragedy of sin and its "wages", which are death. Sometimes men criticize the funeral vigil for its supposed morbidity and gloom; they say that there should be more words of resurrection and life. Yet the vigil itself is not the Church's "final word" about death. It is simply the solemn contemplation upon death's tragic character, its horrid reality and its power as that of sin and alienation from God. The realization of these facts, which particularly in the modern age is so strikingly absent, is the absolute condition for the full appreciation and celebration of the victorious resurrection of Christ and his gracious gift of eternal life to mankind. Without such a preparatory meditation on death, it is doubtful whether the Christian Gospel of Life can be understandable at all. Thus it is not at all ironic that the same St John of Damascus who wrote the joyful canon sung by the Church on the night of Pascha (Easter) is also the author of the Church's songs of death, which are indeed unyielding in their gravity and uncompromising in their bluntness and realism about the inevitable fact of the final fate of fallen human existence. What earthly sweetness remains unmixed with grief? What glory stands immutable on the earth? All things are but feeble shadows, all things are most deluding dreams, yet one moment only, and death shall supplant them all. But in the light of Your countenance, O Christ, and in the sweetness of Your beauty, give rest to him whom You have chosen, for as much as You love mankind. I weep and lament when I think upon death, and behold our beauty created in the likeness of God lying in the tomb disfigured, bereft of glory and form. O the marvel of it! What is this mystery concerning us? Why have we been delivered to corruption? Why have we been wedded unto death? Truly, as it is written, by the command of God Who gives the departed rest (Funeral Hymns). As the funeral service is now normally served, the Beatitudes are chanted after the canon and the hymns of St John, with prayer verses inserted between them on behalf of the dead. The Epistle reading is from First Thessalonians (4:13-17). The gospel reading is from St John (5:24-30). A sermon is preached and the people are dismissed after giving their "final kiss" with the singing of the final funeral song: Eternal Memory. It has to be noted here that this song, contrary to the common understanding of it, is the supplication that God would remember the dead, for in the Bible it is God's "eternal memory" which keeps man alive. Sheol or Hades or the Pit, the biblical realm of the dead also called Abaddon, is the condition of being forsaken and forgotten by God. It is the situation of non-life since in such a condition no one can praise the Lord; and the praise of the Lord is the only content and purpose of man's life; it is the very reason for his existence. Thus, this most famous and final of the Orthodox funeral hymns is the prayer that the departed be eternally alive in the "eternal rest" of the "eternal memory" of God; all of which is made possible and actual by the resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the destruction of the Pit of Death by the splendour of Divine Righteousness and Life (see Ps 88; Hos 13:14; 1 Cori 15; Eph 4:9; Phil 2:5-11; 1 Peter 3). The vigil of the dead should normally be fulfilled in the eucharistic liturgy in which the faithful meet the Risen Lord, and all those who are alive in him, in the glory of his Kingdom of Life. The fact that the funeral vigil, in recent years, has lost its preparatory character and has simply been transformed into the funeral service itself, separated from the eucharistic liturgy, is a sad fact which allows neither for the proper appreciation of the vigil itself nor for the full Christian vision of the meaning of life, death and resurrection in Christ, the Church and the Kingdom of God. The fact that the divine liturgy, when it is preserved with the funeral vigil, is served before it and is made into something mournful, converted into a "requiem mass" offered "on behalf of the dead", is also an innovation of recent centuries under old Roman Catholic influence which further distorts the Christian understanding and experience of death in Christ. |
We know from the Bible that the souls of the departed in Christ, after they are freed from the body, live in another world, beyond this world. However, where that world is, how the souls exist in it, what language they speak, etc. we do not know, although we are so curious for such knowledge.