Praying For Those Who Have Died

- Reflection from Nov 2nd and 9th -

By Fr. Bob Williams

Many of our Catholic teachings in recent years have been challenged by those who do not hold the same beliefs. One example of this is the Catholic teaching that we should pray for those who have died. There are those who have reminded us that we should rely on God's mercy. Jesus, through his death and resurrection, saved us from the ravages of sin. Should we not trust that Jesus will welcome us into heaven? Why should we pray for those who have died? Would that not be a sign of mistrust?

Throughout our lives we are called to follow the path which Jesus taught us. Occasionally we turn aside from that path. We choose to be selfish, thinking only of ourselves and forgetting the needs of others. We call this sin. Sin is a rejection of the love to which God calls us. Sin is not so much breaking rules as it is hurting people. Ironically, the first person we hurt and the person we hurt most is ourselves. When we sin, we build a wall between ourselves and others; becoming a little more lonely, a little more alienated. Sin is telling others that we do not need them or their love. It is telling everyone, God and our loved ones, that we do not care about them.

Throughout our lives we are called to turn from selfishness to love; the purpose of life. We are not here on earth to be happy, as many would have us believe. We are here to be loving. As we mature and learn the lessons of life, we are asked to give more of ourselves to God and others. Thus, when we die, we would have grown so much throughout our life that when we come before God in our final judgment, we will be filled with love and choose God's love for all eternity.

We often speak of the final judgment in terms of God putting us on a scale to decide if we have been good or bad throughout our lives. There is another way to look at the final judgment. God so loves us that he invites us to share heaven for all of eternity. If, throughout our lives we have been good and loving people, if we have learned to trust others and accept their love, then we will lovingly accept God's invitation to live with him for all eternity. If, on the other hand, we have always lived for ourselves, if we have been selfish, if we have tried not to depend on others for anything, in other words. if we have become our own god, then we will turn down God's invitation. We will close ourselves off from the love offered like an armadillo closes its shell to shut out the world. This is hell. We will not need fire or ice for it to be hell. All we will need is the loneliness and alienation that we will have chosen for ourselves. It is an absolutely tragic choice, but if we look around, we already see people who have made this choice and who are living it. We can only pray that no one will make that choice for eternity.

For most of us, the choice will not be quite so clear as an absolute yes or no. Throughout our lives, many of us will have built up a reservoir of selfishness along with a reservoir of love. For the most part we will have chosen love, but there are those areas of our life in which we have held back a little. We have been afraid to surrender to complete love, whether it was accepting love or giving love. We carry that doubt and fear into our last judgment. We want to say "yes" but it seems so difficult to be that loving. This is purgatory. We must eliminate the selfishness and surrender to the purifying fire of God's love.

Why would anyone decide not to go to heaven? The answer to this lies in the fact that many of us have a distorted view of heaven. Our afterlife is seen as an eternal Disneyland where the angels satisfy our every need and desire. Yet that is not exactly what God teaches us. In heaven we become like God. But when God comes down here on earth to teach us what it means to be like God, Jesus teaches us that it means to be a totally loving person. It means to trust totally in the love of the Father and to love others as God has loved us. Thus, when God offers us heaven for all eternity, it is not so much that God is offering us an eternal vacation. God is offering us the opportunity to trust totally and to love totally. To give just one example, it would mean that we are willing to forgive and love our worst enemy for all eternity. This is not easy. Throughout our lives, we come across situations in which we know what the loving thing to do is, but yet it seems as if we do not have enough strength and trust to do it. That is the choice we are making at heaven's gate. God has no problem with us - it is we who have the problem accepting God's love and living with God's love. It is our choice and the choice we make at heaven's gate that is the fulfillment of all the choices we have made all throughout our lives.

If this is true, then why do we pray for the dead? The answer to this question lies in our understanding of prayer. Sometimes we think of prayer as a form of currency that we use to pay God in order to buy our way into heaven or to receive the favour we want or need from God. That is not the case. Prayer is love, for when we pray we are sharing our life and love with another. Not only that, we are joining our love to that of God, and those combined loves visit the person for whom we are praying.

Now it should be obvious why we pray for the dead. When a person dies, that person is asked to make a choice for love. If that person is loved by others, then it is easier for that person to choose love. The person standing before Jesus at heaven's gate is thus being encouraged to choose love not only by Jesus' eternal love, but also by the love which we share through our prayers. We, in effect, are praying a person into heaven (but remember that the person must always make a free choice, for no one can force another to love).

How do we know that the person is not already in heaven? When should we stop praying for a person? These are the wrong questions. Love always visits the person when that person needs it. If I pray yesterday, today or tomorrow, that love will visit the person when he or she is making the choice to love for all eternity. Therefore, we never stop praying for those whom we love. We believe that our love is stronger than death and so we continue to pray for and with that person who has died until we are together once again in heaven. Our prayers are thus a profession of faith in the afterlife, but even more than that, they are a profession of faith in love.

In addition to saying prayers for those who have died, prayer can take on various other forms. Among these forms we find fasting or the performing of some sacrifice. Any sacrifice performed out of love for another is an expression of that love. It is a sign of compassion, an acceptance of the suffering of others into one's own life.

Another form could be the offering of a Mass for the intention of the deceased. By doing this, we join our love to that of the community as we celebrate the Eucharist. We pray that the love we experience in the Eucharist be visited upon that person. The offering we make for the need of the Church is not buying the Mass, it is a sacrifice that we make on behalf of the person for whom the Mass is offered. With this sacrifice, however, it is important to remember that the monetary offering does not substitute for our prayer, it should be an expression of our larger commitment of prayer.

Another form of prayer worthy of mention is the act of forgiving the deceased any unresolved existing situations. All too often we hold grudges or hurts against people who have died. We could clear the air, as it were, by holding a conversation in our heart with the deceased in which we express the hurt and anger. In the very process of forming of feelings into words we will come to a resolution of the situation. Often the only way to come to that resolution is to remember that the person who hurt us was, themselves, a hurting person; and the hurt was a symptom and expression of their hurting. Our prayer becomes a prayer for healing of ourselves for the hurt we have experienced but also for that person who has hurt us. We could also call ourselves to conversion. If we become
more loving, then we will naturally invite those around us to become more loving - not so much by words but rather by example. Our own conversion changes the world.

Finally, as much as we would like everything to work out in our lives and the lives of those around us, we must realize that we often carry a lot of hurt to our grave. Some of the hurt was caused by others, the brokenness we inherit in life, while some of the hurt was self-inflicted (sin). Life can be so complicated that it is not clear exactly how we should love or even what love means in a particular situation. There is a tremendous consolation in knowing that in heaven all the old hurts are healed and the limitations are removed. We will know exactly how to love and we will have the freedom to choose that love, without any ambiguity or doubt. This is a consolation for us as we become terribly impatient with ourselves for not being perfect, but it is also a consolation when we consider those whom we have loved but who did not seem to know how to love in return. Even if we never really saw a response to the love that we tried to share with someone, we can be assured that as the person stands before God, that person will know and understand the love we always intended, for what is now seen only dimly then will be seen clearly.

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