One can always get all navel-gazey about this sort of thing, and sometimes motives are worth a look. After prayer for Hitchens went out, it was followed by lots of meta-analysis of motivation, with reverberations and recriminations. Of course there was some “How can you pray for him when he’s so nastily atheistic?” and so on. Also we got the charge of showy piety. (“Look at me! I’m praying for my enemies!”) And there was even the charge that it was a pious, Church Lady way of saying, “Hey, Hitchens! Look at how superiorly loving I am to you and your angry atheist buddies!”
Understandable to a degree. The obligation to pray for one’s enemies can put one in a bind. It does sound pretty Church Ladyish to look at some guy who just finished reaming you out in a steroid rage and say, “God bless you,” especially when the physiological fight-or-flight response leaves you trembling with animal passions you are trying to master by dint of will. To the onlooker you can often resemble a hypocrite in denial about his hatred when, in fact, you are laboring to do the right thing.
Moreover, you can find Pharisees who use prayer as a passive-aggressive weapon (“Have you heard about John Smith—that’s S-M-I- T-H? Let me whisper the juicy details! So you can pray.”) And these are but a few of the ways that praying for the living can get you into trouble, whether real or perceived. But still, we are called to do it—indiscriminately and constantly. The world is dying for want of Christians actually living out the common priesthood of our baptism.
The essence of priesthood is twofold: It entails “standing between” and “offering sacrifice.” We stand, as priests, between God and man. And the sacrifice we offer, as laypeople, is ourselves in union with Christ. So Paul tells us: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1).
Of course, what sanctifies our self-offering is not us but Jesus Christ, who offers his body and blood on the cross and to us in the sacrifice of the Mass. Because his body and blood are holy, our bodies are made holy and become part of the offering. And as they are offered in union with him, they participate in the work of salvation. That’s why Paul can write one of the most Catholic passages in all of Scripture: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).
Paul’s offering of his body (and our offering of ours) is incorporated into Christ’s and becomes part of Christ’s self-offering to the Father in each Mass. Our sufferings are joined to his, but also our prayers are joined to his. For as Paul tells us, we “yield [ourselves] to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and [our] members to God as instruments of righteousness” (Romans 6:13). That includes our tongues, which offer prayer for the living and the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit.
It’s a bit of a toss-up which is harder: praying for the living or praying the dead. The problem with the living is that they stubbornly retain free will, so there is always the danger that, in the words of the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: “People, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, will do exactly as they please.” Prayer for things like repentance, healing from addiction, relationships, and other such things can all go radically awry. People pray their guts out for things that never come to pass in this world and that can be heartbreaking to endure. Often such prayer can wind up being a journey of discovery. We think we know what’s best only to discover that we were radically wrong—and that God’s grace was changing us, not the circumstances we were demanding he fix. The grinding stone of other human wills can often be how God polishes us through our prayers.
On the other hand, prayer for the dead has its own challenges. For of course, the dead are unusually quiet about whether your prayers do them any good. Now and then blessed souls (like St. Perpetua) are favored with a vision of their dead kid brother turning up happy and healthy in the heavenlies after a Mass was said for him. But most of us don’t seem to rate these aids to faith. Instead we go on the insistence of the Church that prayers for the dead, like prayers for the living, are not merely good and pious and consoling to us but effective for the dead.
For the truth is, we don’t merely remember the dead by our prayers; we help them. In short, prayer for the dead is not about us. It’s not some sort of self-hypnosis, therapy, or coping mechanism. It’s about assisting the dead in the completion of their purgation, which, but for our prayers, they would be hard-pressed to complete themselves.
This cuts right to the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation: the reality of the body as the “hinge of salvation.” What we have that the dead in purgatory lack is the same thing whereby God saved us: a body. Our body matters so much that God himself so created the universe that we could not be saved without his taking on a body like ours. And because he did that, the Son of God could speak of his death as a true necessity for our salvation, stating, “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!” (Luke 12:50), and even praying that the cup be taken from him “if it be possible” (Matthew 26:39).
It was not possible. Therefore the body is bound up with the saving power of God. And offering our bodies as living sacrifices in union with Christ’s in the sacrifice of the Mass therefore becomes a powerful means by which we can pray for those who have died, helping them on their way to full conformity to Christ. That’s why the tradition has always linked prayer with fasting and other forms of penance—particularly on behalf of the dead.
Some have difficulty with this, though it is difficult to see why. If we can pray for each other—if, in fact, we are commanded to pray for each other—it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t pray for those who have died. The practice predates the establishment of the Church (see 2 Maccabees 12:38–46), follows from the logic of all prayer (by which creatures are made free participants in Christ’s saving work), and has no internal contradiction to it. Since we are members of one another (see Romans 12:5) and neither life nor death can sever us from the love of God in Christ (see Romans 8:38–39), then our prayers can extend beyond the grave to benefit those who are still in the process of becoming fully conformed to the image and likeness of Christ. About the only objection you can make is that the dead, being dead, are past probation and so their choice for heaven or hell has been decided at death.
True enough. But what do we know about that? Zilch. What we know is that Christ said to pray for God’s will to be done and for his kingdom to come. So we pray that Joe the Mechanic, who was a decent enough guy and who didn’t rip you off when your alternator broke, will be met with favor in the Great Assizes because the King will say to him, “My alternator was busted, and you didn’t rip me off. Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.” You pray for that kid who gave you swirlies in junior high, that maybe in the years afterward his three divorces and drug-addicted kids helped buff off whatever made him the nasty kid you remember and gave him, in the end, the bitterly won gift of humility. You step on to an airplane that your father helped Boeing build and remember to pray, yet again, for the repose of his soul, grateful for the countless gifts he gave you.
In the end, of course, you often don’t know what your prayers are doing for those folks in the beyond. But you know God. And you know that Jesus wants them in heaven even more than you do. You know that while you have never endured the extremity of crucifixion for them, Jesus has. And so you pray in hope, not that your prayers are such hot stuff that God just has to listen in his awe of you, but that when they are joined to Christ’s prayers remarkable things can happen, as they have happened down through the centuries when people stop speculating about prayer and begin doing it.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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