STOP PRAYING FOR THE DEAD sac vol.2 As people were heading for Fr. Mbaka’s Mass or Money last Sunday, I chose the extra-ordinary: I hopped into a Pentecostal Church, not to understudy them as is the intention of some who patronize Amen, but just to catch a glimpse of their belief. In the church heaving with adherents, there was this lady evangelist who was forceful with the word of God, or so I think, on the untiring and attentive listeners. Whether she saw me in the spirit (?) and began to attack my faith, I do not know. But the moment I entered the church, she hysterically shouted stop praying for the dead. She began navigating the Bible to shore her position up that praying for the dead is a biblically condemnable ancestorism. I was almost sure that she saw me since she seemed to aim her fist at my direction. Badly jarred by the condemnations meted to my catholic faith, I courageously stalked behind the evangelist after the service. I introduced myself to her and humbly registered my displeasure with her sermon. I quoted Macc.12:46; Wis.3:1ff and other traditional scriptural backings for our catholic practice of praying for the dead, but to no avail. She does not believe in the canonicity of the Deutero-Canonical books. We exchanged Telephone numbers and parted ways. Now, my worries have been how to get this lady convinced that our dead ones need our prayers without using our traditional scriptural passages. This is because I suspect that she has been immune to them. So, help me vet my cogitations before my next diet with her. God is love. God cannot not be Himself. Therefore, His love is necessarily genuine since He is the Perfect Being. He loves each of us more than we can love ourselves or one another. So, the love which exists between you and the sweetest person in your life is inferior compared with the love that exists between God and the worst sinner. Although fashioned by Love, we never can love purely as God loves because love is not our nature as it is God’s. Thus, while our love is measurable (compared with God’s), God’s love is immeasurable. The immeasurable encompasses and subsumes the measurable. Now, in our measurable love, we can love one another according to the perfection of our nature. In this measurable love, there are but degrees: to love beyond death is more precious than to love until the severance of death. We have scores of people who love beyond death even if majority end their love at the graveside of their loved ones. Some people, not necessarily Catholics, have kept wishing their dead ones well after many years of their demise. This is the love that defies death. Since this type of love is preferable to the one that stops at the stroke of death, and since God’s love is superior to ours, then we can logically hold that God’ love for the dead defies death, that He still loves our departed ones with the same love of His that never turns stale nor expires (see Mk.12:27). Love is a continuum and has to go beyond the grave if it is genuine. To some extent, loveableness is immortality and whoever is unlovable is mortal. Those we love truly can never truly die. Before God then, there is no dead Christian because He truly loves us and we can never truly die before Him. So, death is not the end of love between the living and the dead. If this is so, and it is so, whoever we love, we wish well, otherwise the love is sterile. Praying for the dead is no more than wishing them well. We can now understand why St Paul said that love remains (1cor.13:13). In another place, he says: “I am certain that neither death nor life…can separate us from the love of God” (Rom.8:38-39). Alive or dead, we belong to Christ (Rom.14: 8). so, death doesn’t destroy the bond of love. When someone dear to us dies, we lose his/her presence, but not his/her essence, we lose his/her company, but not his/her communion, we lose his/her here, but not his/her there. If there is a chasm instead of concern between the dead and the living, it is not because the one is unlovable as it is that the other is unloving. What we love never can rust, what rusts is not loved. Those we love never die. Do not let them die! Ugwu Vitus SAC means: Swimming against the Current.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 22:46:13 +0000
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