Читать книгу Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death - Ray Simpson - Страница 32

No consolation can be so certain and so lasting to you as that softened and manly sorrow which springs up from the memory of the Dead. CHARLES DICKENS

Many questions arise when someone we are close to dies. Are their souls conscious? Do they remember us? Are they still involved in some way in our lives? C.S. Lewis wrote this to a friend whose father had died:

I feel very strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death; as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind … Certainly they often seem just at that time to be very near us. ¹⁴

Many religions believe that there are bodiless as well as embodied spirits. Christianity believes in this, and in what it calls ‘the communion of saints’. However, churches in the West from the fourteenth century onwards got in a tangle about how we should relate to holy souls who have died. Catholics added on what their critics thought were superstitious ideas. Protestants, according to their critics, threw out the baby as well as the bathwater by making the role of the dead a no-go area.

Before Christianity divided into these conflicting traditions (and still today in Orthodox, and increasingly again in new Western churches), ‘the communion of saints’ was understood as follows.

Christ is truly divine, truly human, ever living, and the Head of his Body, which is the Church on earth and in heaven – all who have ever been joined to him. All who are joined to Christ have his life and his mind flowing through them. So the Church on earth carries in its prayers the whole Church, on earth and in heaven. And the Church in heaven, like its Head, carries in its heart the whole Church, on earth as well as in heaven, although each does this according to their particular calling.

The Bible indicates that believers who have died are alert and aware, even though they have not yet received what the Bible calls their ‘resurrection body’. For example, in relation to great believers such as Abraham, Jesus says about God, ‘He is not the God of the dead but of the living’ (Luke 20:38). Hebrews 12:22–4 says that we mortals are in the presence, not only of God and of angels, but also of just souls who have been made perfect. It would surely not say this if they were inactive and unaware. Paul was sure he would be alive after his death, saying he desired ‘to depart and be with Christ’ (Philippians 1:23, NRSV). Although, from the point of view of those of us who remain on earth, those who have died are ‘asleep’, this is only a temporary, physical separation.

From the time of Jesus, when the prophets Elijah and Moses appeared to him and three friends on a mountain (see Matthew 17:1–8), and throughout Christian history, certain Christ-like persons have appeared to people living on earth. This is unsolicited, a divine gift, and should not be confused with the practice of summoning up the dead, which is forbidden in the Bible (see Leviticus 19:31; 20:6).

The Church, knowing all this, found nothing in the Scriptures that would prohibit Christians from expressing a sense of fellowship with those who have died.

One way to do this is to visualize the communion of saints in sign, singing and sacrament. Perhaps the most natural way to do it is to pray for them – not to change their state of salvation (for their eternal destiny is already decided by God, as Hebrews 9:27 tells us), but rather to share in the process which never ends, of ‘being changed from glory into glory’ (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Those who ask the saints to pray for them are asking them to help them by praying to God. Since God alone is Uncreated, and we are created beings, we should not imagine that there is no variety of responsibility or closeness to God in heaven.

Even if you are among those Christians who do not believe your prayers can affect those in heaven, you can still talk to God about those who have died, simply because it helps to do so. Since Jesus is the Mediator between God and humans (see 1 Timothy 2:5), we can pour out everything we want to say to our departed loved ones and ask Jesus to communicate to them anything of this that he thinks is appropriate. Thus our prayers for the departed can help to preserve and increase the unity between the Church on earth and the Church in heaven.

In many parts of the world, suffering people have been upheld through their belief that a saintly Christian who gave their life for that area is still interceding to God for them in their time of need. Sometimes, in a crisis, there have been visions of the saint followed by a miracle. In Georgia, Southern Russia, Christians often sing a hymn to St Nina, who brought the Faith to that country, which concludes, ‘With the angels you have praised in song the Redeemer, praying constantly for us that Christ may grant us His grace and mercy.’ Many people in northern England strongly sensed that Durham City and Cathedral were saved during World War II by the prayers of St Cuthbert, who is buried there.

Christians believe that death cannot sever the bond of mutual love between the members of the Church on earth and in heaven.

For all the saints who from their labours rest,

Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,

Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest,

Alleluia!

O blest communion, fellowship divine!

We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.

Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.

Alleluia!

W. WALSHAM HOW, 1823–97