Minute of silence
You can remember the dead only when you believe that they are alive. This thought, paradoxical at first glance, is confirmed, however, not even by church teaching, but by ordinary human intuition. “We’ll all be there...” is the most common formula among our people for commemorating the dead. And it must be said that this is a very deep relationship - looking at someone else’s death, remembering your own. But there is a very important point, which is not indicated in any way in this formulation: and, in fact, where is it – “there”? What is beyond the line that the deceased has already crossed, and which sooner or later each of us will have to cross? If behind it there is only emptiness, non-existence and the complete destruction of human self-awareness, then the very phrase “we will all be there...” loses all meaning, since there is simply no “there” in this case and cannot be. It turns out that by remembering our dead even with such a simple phrase, we confess our faith in three serious facts at once:
1. Biological death does not destroy the human personality.
2. After death, having lost his body, a person finds himself in another, still unknown to us, but quite real world.
3. The transition to this world is objectively inevitable for all people, regardless of their personal desire.
When a loved one is admitted to the hospital, we visit him, bring him books, fruits and chicken broth in a jar, tell him the latest news and, saying goodbye, say that we will definitely come to him again tomorrow. If someone dear to us is in prison, we also know how to show our love for him, we know what he needs, we collect parcels for him and send him parcels, write letters, go on dates, in short - we do everything , which can help him endure the hardships of imprisonment.
But when a loved one dies, it always puts us in some kind of dead end. No, we, of course, did not love him less; the bitterness of separation even strengthened our feeling and helped us understand how dear to us is the one whom death took from us. But what to do next, how to express this love of ours, how to make it reach our loved one and help him, or please him where he finds himself - we don’t know.
We simply have no experience of being there - beyond earthly life, we cannot even imagine what happens to a person after death. And when you lack your own personal experience, it is quite reasonable to turn for help to where such experience is available - to turn to the Church, which has been commemorating its dead for almost two thousand years and has a huge amount of evidence of the effectiveness of prayerful remembrance of the dead. Therefore, very often the death of a loved one brings to the Church even those for whom the opinion of the Church has never been authoritative in all other issues of their life.
In general, without belief in life after death, remembering the dead is a rather pointless activity. During the Soviet period of our country’s history, there was such a tradition - to honor the memory of those who died in the Great Patriotic War with a minute of silence. For an atheistic state, this was a very logical ritual. The man’s heart demanded: “Thank these people. For your calm and peaceful existence, they gave the most precious thing they had - their life. You are forever in their debt, thank them.” But the mind objected: “How can you thank those who are not there? What words can you say to someone who is not just not next to you, but nowhere at all, just as you yourself were not there before you were born?” There is no point in addressing non-existence with any words; there really remains only mournful silence. Like some kind of solemn expression by an unbeliever of his powerlessness in the face of the death of loved ones.
For the atheistic consciousness, only wordless forms of commemorating the dead are possible, be it a minute of silence, or a memorial glass - silently and without clinking glasses.
But if a person refuses to believe that his loved ones, dying, disappeared without a trace in the cosmic space, if he believes that they are alive, and hopes for a future meeting with them (even after his own death), then for such a person to express his hope, faith and love simply need words. And a simple, casual “...we’ll all be there” is clearly not enough here. We need other words - more precise and beautiful, we need to understand what the meaning of such a commemoration is, we need to figure out, finally, what happens to a person in this most mysterious “there”, where we all will eventually have to end up.
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Meeting with loved ones and relatives after death.Hello, my dear readers!
Happy New Year to you!
I hope you are having a good rest in the company of your family and friends.
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Today I have chosen this topic for our communication from M. Handel’s book “Questions and Answers,” as well as from my answers to similar questions to our readers. M. Handel at one time, after he published his main work “The Cosmoconception of the Rosicrucians,” received a huge number of letters with additional questions, the answers to which were subsequently collected and published. They are all very interesting and I think we will be happy to examine many of them.
By the way, I have long wanted to attach a photograph of M. Handel to the issue, but I kept forgetting, but today I will finally do it.
Max Heindel
(1865-1919)
Question from M. Handel's book:
Do we meet our loved ones after death if they were of a different religion or even atheists?
M. Handel's answer: Yes, of course we meet them and we recognize them because in death there is no power of transformation. A person will go to those worlds exactly the same as he was here, because he imagines himself in exactly the same forms as he looked here during life, but the place where we meet, of course, depends on several things.
Firstly, if we lived a deeply religious life and observed the Laws of God, then our time in Purgatory will be unusually short, and then our time in the First Heaven will also be short, because such people have little that would keep them in the World Desires, and also during their lives they tried to feel not only the pain of others (and therefore will now be freed from Purgatory), but also the joy of other people, i.e. they have already fulfilled the purpose of the World of Desires here during their lifetime and therefore will be able to move so quickly to the next World of Thought. Their desire is to get to the Second Heaven in the World of Thought, where they will comprehend with great pleasure the depths of divine existence.
But if the beloved of such a person was of a different nature and had other interests that could detain him for a long time in the World of Desires, then their meeting may linger for quite a long time until this second beloved completes his time in the World of Desires and moves to the World of Thought , where they can finally meet.
If it so happened that we died soon after such a friend of ours, then our meeting with him in Heaven would not have taken place for perhaps twenty years (I remind you that we mean a person who led a highly spiritual life and therefore he will not stay long in Purgatory, when his atheist friend, who did not observe the Laws of Nature during his life, will have to stay for quite a long time in this place); but at the same time, we must not forget that in those worlds time has no meaning at all and 20 years can pass almost unnoticed.
A materialistic friend who has lived a good life with high moral principles, as we often find in the case of such people, would remain in the fourth region of the World of Desire for a certain number of years, according to the length of time of his life, and only then would he pass to the Second Heaven, although it must be noted that his stay here will not be as complete and as wonderful as that of a person of high religious and spiritual values.
Here we would see him, recognize him when we meet and be associated for many centuries in working on our future environment, and here, in the Second Heaven, he would no longer be a materialist at all. Here, each of us knows and feels like a spiritual being and has a memory of this earthly life only as some kind of bad dream. Therefore, no matter what faith a person may be and no matter what atheist he may be during his life, after his death, ascending through the spiritual worlds, he will eventually, in any case, come to the realization of his own true divine nature.
I have also been asked similar questions many times and I would like to give here my answer, based, of course, on the knowledge of the teaching:
Yes, of course, we will meet all our family and loved ones there! Indeed, in cases of clinical death of people who visited there and then returned, they all speak about it with one voice. Remember that in the World of Desires there are 2 laws - the law of attraction and repulsion. The first is inherent in the highest layers of this World, and the second - in its lower ones, i.e. Purgatory. In the case of dating your family and loved ones, of course, the law of attraction works. And as a rule, they know there when the time is right for his relative to die here and come to meet him. They also somehow know if that time has come or not. That is, sometimes a person will find himself in a state of clinical death, he will meet someone there and that person, who has already died for us, will tell him that this is not his time yet, his hour has not yet come and that he needs to go back.
But let's go back to those two laws. Since the law of attraction is characteristic of the upper strata, and the deceased must still reach them by first passing his time in Purgatory, those close and dear ones cannot stay with him for a long time. They will come to greet him and tell him something, but they cannot stay with him for long. The law of repulsion will begin to work and they will have to part. But not because this law repels everything that comes along. No, this law only works in the case of negative people. phenomena, in this way we undergo gradual purification and we gradually free ourselves from our bad traits and thus become purified. In the case of relatives, if they were loved and desired, then in order to see them, the law of repulsion does not work (it is, on the contrary, attraction). But they will need to separate for a while. If those relatives themselves are still passing time in Purgatory, then they will see each other more often, and if they have already passed through Purgatory and are already in the First Heaven, then the newly deceased will have to wait until he himself reaches that layer - everything is there only good.
A little more about this topic. You mentioned billions of deaths and you probably think that we are all mixed up there. No, in general, people from the same country end up in the same world, similar to what was on earth, that is, Russians with Russians, Englishmen with Englishmen, etc. This happens again according to the law of attraction. We are drawn to the area that is most understandable to us. Also, according to faith, our Worlds are generally separated, but if you wish, you can get into another world - the world of Muslims, for example. See someone there, but after some time you will definitely want to return to the world of your religion.
But there is another unexpected news for you, perhaps! At a certain time, we will be able to see there, if we again wish, all our previous lives and the memory of all those incidents and experiences will be revealed to us. And therefore, in addition to people close to us in this life, we will also meet many of our loved ones from past lives! Many of them are already waiting for us there!
After a certain stay in the higher worlds and after we learn to study our past lives, if we wish, we can find out how many times we have loved and who we loved. And, if our loved ones from past lives at that moment are in the same World with us (i.e. the World of Desires or the World of Thoughts - which is most likely), then we will be able to meet all of them and this will not embarrass us at all. Somehow we will be able to love them all at once... And then we need to remember that love in the higher worlds has no physical attraction. You will leave that feeling far behind in Purgatory, because... it is the lowest feeling of love. But you will take everything higher with you, and it is this that will allow you to remember your loved ones from different lives.
Question from M. Handel's book:
Will we recognize our loved ones who cross the gates of death? ( I think this means when both of these people die and will they be able to recognize each other in that world? )
M. Handel's answer : Yes, of course we recognize our loved ones there. When a person leaves his dense body forever, outwardly he remains exactly the same as he was at the time of death. The only difference is that he no longer has a physical body, but he sees himself in the World of Desire the same as in this life, since in his consciousness there are pictures not only of his entire life lived, but also pictures of that what he looked like here. And as soon as he moves into the World of Desire, these pictures of his consciousness will immediately take on the appropriate form, so that anyone who knew him in earthly life will also recognize him there.
Moreover, it would be good to add that in death there is no power of transformation, that a person remains mentally and morally exactly the same as before the moment of death. We often hear in our lives how people who loved someone talk about the person who left them, almost as an angel, even if he was actually a real devil during his lifetime. But they usually think it is disrespectful to the memory of the deceased to address him the same way he deserved during his lifetime.
However, the fact remains that the one who was a good person will be good even after his death, and the one who had a terrible character will pass into another world without changing at all.
I also have my answer to Vladimir, but unfortunately without the original of his questions, which were very interesting, but I think that in the course of the description you will be able to determine them yourself.
So, a little more clarification about meetings in heaven:
I cannot answer these questions of yours exactly, namely how exactly a meeting with family and loved ones occurs. But logically, for this they need, firstly, their own desire to meet and see you. Therefore, if some relatives passed away from a person’s life when he was a baby, then, probably, they will not be very interested in seeing him, unless they loved that baby and remembered him. In general, it all depends on the desires of the souls themselves, firstly, and, secondly, for this they also need to obtain permission from those “superior” above us there.
Regarding orphans, do you mean their parents? After all, during their lives they will still make friends and acquaintances, and they will also be happy to come to meet them. But, if you mean mother and father, then again everything will depend on the desires of those parents. In the World of Desire there are 2 laws, if you remember - the law of attraction and repulsion. The latter operates in the lower layers of this world, and the former in its upper layers. And, of course, to see your loved one - the law of attraction will operate here and it will automatically make everything happen for your loved ones, attract them to each other.
About those who are going through Purgatory at the moment. Remember in the issue of how severe the pain is in Purgatory, we discussed that there are temporary periods of rest between working off various acts - during this period the soul can see its loved ones or meet a new arrival, if necessary. If they are very busy with work at that time, then I think they will be able to see each other a little later, when they have finished and completed a certain lesson, although I am not entirely sure about this. It seems to me that they can still see other people during detention, it will probably depend on what type of detention.
And maniacs can also be met by relatives if they loved him. A mother, for example, you can’t change a mother’s heart. Or his criminal friends.
But those who died prematurely and suddenly are not always met and they are not even always helped to explain what happened to them. Just recently, a mother wrote me a letter who lost her son at the age of 22 (he was a drug addict), and she writes that after his death, her son often came into her dreams, called her, did not understand where he was and kept asking where he was? You see, it means that no one there explained to him what happened to him, because he didn’t even understand that he had already died! By the way, about dreams in which we see the dead: they always show the state of that person in the higher worlds at the time of the dream, i.e. they definitely need to be believed!
And as for the panorama, I can definitely assure you that no one except the person viewing it can see it! Only he and no one else is able to view the panorama of his life. So no one there can peek at the actions of other people. Somehow the panorama becomes visible only to the person who owns it.
That's all for today.
Write to me: [email protected]
I wish you a fun time!
See you soon!
Your Svetlana
What are believers afraid of?
The 10th-century Armenian poet Grigor Narekatsi (revered as a saint in Armenia) wrote:
I know that the day of Judgment is close and at the Judgment we will be convicted of many things... But isn’t God’s Judgment a meeting with God? Where will the Court be? I'll hurry there!
No one in the world can predict with complete certainty the posthumous fate of this or that person. But the Church speaks with confidence about an event that is inevitable for all people: after death, each of us will definitely meet with God.
But whether this meeting will become a source of eternal joy for a person, or will turn out to be painful and unbearable for him, depends on how he himself lived his life. If he prepared himself for this important meeting, strived for it, if all his life the main criterion for evaluating his actions, words and even thoughts was the question: “Will God like this?”, then dying for such a person is no longer very scary. No, of course, the upcoming meeting with the Lord causes excitement and trembling in his heart. He knows better than anyone how often his desire to live righteously was broken by his own laziness, greed, vanity, how unsuccessful almost every attempt was to do something for the sake of God, and not for the sake of his own passions and whims. But he also knows something else. Trying to live according to God's commandments, he saw with surprise and joy that God loved him even so weak and imperfect, incapable, in fact, of anything good. This real experience of God’s love is the main, most precious value in the life of every believer. He learned to see with what touching care and attention the Lord participated in his earthly life. And it seems absurd to him to even assume that after death God will turn away from him and replace this love with soulless and cold justice.
A believer is concerned with a completely different question: “Won’t I turn away from God when I meet? Will it suddenly turn out that there is something more dear to me in the world than God?” This is what a believer truly fears. But such fear is dissolved by hope. God, who makes up for our shortcomings and helps us in earthly life, can even after our death make up for our weakness with His Omnipotence. It was precisely this Christian attitude towards oneself and towards God that Boris Grebenshchikov spoke about in one of his early songs:
...But we walk blindly in strange places, And all we have is joy and fear.
Fear that we are worse than we can And joy that everything is in Safe Hands.
Meeting with father-in-law
I always called my father-in-law by his first and patronymic names. It so happened that during his last days on Earth we lived together.
When his accident happened, none of us could have imagined that this would be his last time on Earth. It seemed that a few days in the hospital, and he would be around again as before.
However, fate always has its own plans for each of us.
A few days after he left for the Spiritual World, I woke up to the sound of him calling me by name. His voice calling me was so real that it seemed like he was standing near the door in the room. I didn't feel any fear. This happened for the first time in my life, and that is why I was not ready for it. I didn't know what to do. Apparently at that moment my consciousness was in a trance state, but due to the unexpectedness of everything that was happening, I came out of it and the experience was interrupted.
A few days later, my father-in-law came to me again in a dream. He looked happy and cheerful. Being next to him made me feel sad. He was already Home, and I still had a lot of work to do here on Earth. When I asked how he was feeling, he smiled and said mysteriously that he had new opportunities. I did not specify what these opportunities were. His happy appearance spoke for itself.
Lost pilot
When we turn away from the light, we risk finding ourselves in the darkness of our own shadow. If a person has made the main content of his life not the desire to change for the better, not preparation for this posthumous meeting with his Creator, if he has exchanged his life for cheap or expensive entertainment, for the intoxication of power, money or his own genius, then he has serious problems.
Without learning to love God, without seeing His love for oneself during life, and having tightly shut oneself into the shell of one’s own passions and desires, a person cannot and will not want to be with God even after his death.
Sin is terrible because a person can enjoy it only while he is alive. The purpose of the soul is to control the body, and only in their combined existence can a person fully live, act and change himself both for the better and for the worse. Death takes the body away from the soul and makes it incapable of any action, and therefore of change. The soul can no longer sin or repent; and, as it became at the time of a person’s death, it will remain so in eternity. To make this clearer, we can imagine that our life is a flight, our body is an airplane, and our soul is a pilot who knows that his fuel supply is limited and allows him to fly, say, five thousand kilometers to his destination. If he does not lose contact with the dispatcher and keeps the right course, then despite bad weather, poor health and engine problems, he will still reach the airfield. Or he will make an emergency landing somewhere nearby, so that rescuers can easily find him. But when the pilot flies at random, wherever his eyes look, without reference points and goals, and doesn’t even think about what will happen to him and where he will end up when the fuel runs out in the tanks... Most likely, such a would-be pilot will completely get lost, landing in God knows where, and there he will disappear without a trace, because it is unclear where to look for the one who was flying to an unknown destination. And he can’t get out of there on foot.
The Lord spoke about this very clearly: “Whatever I find, that is what I will judge.” This does not mean at all that God is indifferent to what happened to a person before death, and in what condition he died. On the contrary, the Church says that the Lord calls a person to judgment at the most favorable moment for his posthumous fate.
Each of us dies either at the peak of our spiritual development, or when God sees that further life will change his soul only for the worse. But a person must take the right course and lead himself to this spiritual maximum. And no one can do this work for him, not even God.
But what can relatives do for such a lost pilot, how can they help him? They can do a lot - make the phone of the head of the airfield, which the missing pilot could not reach, red-hot, bombard the ministry with letters, bang their fists on the table in various offices and - demand, demand, demand the organization of new rescue and search expeditions. The right to such persistence gives them love for the missing.
And our love makes us turn to God with requests for forgiveness of the sins of our loved ones and for their repose “with the saints.” This is one of the meanings of prayerful remembrance of the departed in the Orthodox Church.
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Several years ago, one of my relatives asked me a question: who can visit the dying three days before death?
Because they are children, they watched for three days as their mother, and my aunt, talked to someone and laughed a lot, waved her hands, telling something herself. True, all this was in my head, because I couldn’t speak out loud due to my illness. Then my relative received an answer from the priests. But more than once in my life I have come across stories from relatives that before they die, some people talk to someone invisible. But everyone experiences “departures” differently. Various information is described by esotericists. Today I found the authors about this topic, which I propose here: In this article we will answer the question of readers who clarify - who meets the soul of a newly deceased person after death? Old concepts claimed that she was greeted by relatives who had died before the person. We do not dispute this fact, but continue to expand the concepts on this issue. Each person meets individually. High souls, for example, do not need to be greeted by their relatives. When they find themselves in the next world, they partially remember the rules of the soul’s transition from the gross world to the subtle world and the possibilities of this existence. They are met by Tall luminous Beings, called angels by people. In fact, these can be highly developed souls of former people who are intensively improving in a spiritual direction and have accumulated a large volume of high energies, providing them with a bright glow. Among them there may be angels from energy worlds. This, by the way, is another form of existence of the soul after the death of a person - luminous Essence-angels. But in this form, the person usually remains only in the subtle world, helping the Higher Essences work with the souls of dead people. In fact, such souls are assigned to work in the Separator (otherwise the Distributor). Cosmic souls also do not meet their relatives, because they belong to other worlds, they do not need this as an act of consolation. In their worlds, everything could happen differently, so they are exempt from observing earthly rituals. But they are met by certain high Essences who specialize in working with cosmic souls, they immediately separate them from the general masses of mere mortals and send them to special compartments of the Distributor, intended for the souls of missionaries from other worlds, from where they are then sent to their cosmic Systems. They do not undergo the Judgment and do not spend a long time waiting for it, but they do undergo partial purification. As for the souls of doctors, as we said earlier in other books, their souls do not fall into a common separator, but immediately fly to the Medical System (the Help System is also located here). They have their own Separator and their own Court there. The main emphasis in assessing their lives is not on the everyday side of existence, but on their medical activities and development in this quality of healing and quality of care. But in their Separator there is a distribution of souls according to their main specialization and qualifications. The souls of doctors are divided into Levels: low, medium, high. In the future, they will move on to treating other cosmic beings, and for this they will need to acquire new knowledge about other states of physical matter and the multiplicity of its subtle forms. But let's return to the souls of mere mortals. They can be met both by relatives who died before them, and by luminous beings. Relatives are rarely genuine. Most often these are holograms of relatives. Few of those who died earlier remain free. Having passed the Court, he is distributed into his own world and begins to improve in it. So that the memory of his past earthly life does not interfere with his execution of the new program, it is often closed. A person seems to forget about everything that happened to him before and calmly exists in a new world. True, some souls can retain their memory for up to a year or more. Some low souls fall asleep, therefore, cannot meet their relatives. For some middle and high souls, the memory is not blocked, they simply do not return to unnecessary memories themselves and consciously improve in the new world. Such souls gradually forget about the earthly plane, just as a person forgets about his early childhood and adolescence. He can remember individual moments, but not every day of his existence. And the new aspirations and tasks that he has to solve in the new world help him direct his soul towards the future, and not live with old memories. Due to the fact that many souls forget about earthly existence and former relatives, and also because of their busyness, the High Essences do not distract them to meet with the souls of recently deceased relatives. After all, they are already in other worlds and returning to the Separator to old memories is unpleasant for them. On the one hand, this is too troublesome for the Higher Ones - to look for relatives already distributed somewhere in their worlds and distract them from work, and on the other hand, the relatives themselves have already forgotten a lot, and returning them to old and unnecessary, and sometimes painful memories is not reasonable. In this regard, purely for humane reasons, the Higher Ones came up with the idea that after death souls would be greeted by holograms of former relatives. Why do we mention humanity? After all, no one could have met the soul. But at the moment of death, many souls, flying out of the body, experience stress and great confusion. The soul is depressed because it has parted forever with its beloved body and with the beautiful earthly world; it is in confusion, since it often does not even understand what happened to it and what to do next. Therefore, in order to smooth out these negative impressions and speed up the adaptation of the soul in the new world, the Highest Ones came up with a procedure for meeting their relatives, reproduced in the form of holograms. But the soul, understanding little about them, takes them for real relatives. At the end of each corridor-tunnel along which the soul flies, entering the Distributor, a technical device for producing holograms is installed. And data about all deceased relatives, including their appearance, corresponding to their stay in the earthly world, is in the computer of the Determinant, which led the student’s soul through life. (All souls look young in the next world. There are no old people there. And this is due to the properties of subtle matter and the new program of the soul, which does not include settings for the aging of the outer shell). So by the time the soul exits the tunnel into the “white” world, holograms of relatives are already waiting for him, they greet him with joyful exclamations, with love and help him accept what happened as a given and normal phenomenon. After the meeting is over, the High Essences take the soul of the deceased to the waiting room, and the machine that reproduces the holograms is turned off, and all hologram relatives disappear. (Pages 35-38 book “THE GREAT TRANSITION” Authors Seklitova L.A., Strelnikova L.L.) And some are met by ANGELS. An amazing vision of my Wonderful Interlocutor from the funeral of her good friend on March 22, 2014. “Today I was at the funeral from very early morning, it was interesting and very beautiful.
The family was very broad, there were a lot of people. And it is very strange today that in their family there are more men than women. The deceased Vitalia was very beautiful for her age, and despite her illness, she looked good and lay in the coffin, all so bright and smiling. And you must have, probably, THERE strong patrons that she went to the hospital two weeks ago with metastases in the bones, was in a coma for three days and left. What was interesting was that I saw her, how she walked among her relatives. She came up to me, put her hand on my hands and asked, if possible, to tell her husband that she was grateful to him and forgives him. And then she stood in front of her sons. She played with the hair of one and pressed his head to her chest. She went up to the other and kissed him on the forehead. She still stood in front of her husband. She just patted me on the shoulder. She looked at everyone with sympathy and a gentle smile, as if pitying them. And when they sang long prayers about the path of Jesus Christ, I saw how they came, like very tall Angels with lanterns in their hands. They were like the same. The colors of a pale moon, narrow faces with large eyes. The hair is the same light. And dresses of white silver that quietly swayed on them as they approached. And these Angels lined up as if in a corridor and stood there like that. The spectacle was breathtaking. And today I saw how they handed her the same lantern and she left along that corridor, and they went with her. I realized that she was one of them too. Not a single tear fell from me, but I wanted to hug her like a sister before the road. I sat and looked, my mouth almost open. And I also saw how, before leaving, she made a cross at everyone and seemed to look around with some kind of diagram with her eyes. This is how I understood it, that this is according to the order of their departure. She smiled at me and tilted her head slightly. The deceased was similar in appearance to her earthly image, but shorter than those Angels. I had a double vision of her." (c). You can talk about this and more
Mom's hand
Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov called the existence of the soul in hell - being without being, a strange form of life in the absence of life. Strangely enough, we have all experienced this inability of the sinful soul to act to varying degrees already now, during our lifetime.
Probably, any person has at least once experienced a state of deep depression and despondency. When you lie on the sofa, turned to the wall, and you don’t want to see or hear anyone. When even the sunlight interferes with your life, and you run from it, draw the curtains, cover your head with a blanket just so as not to see the darkness that has taken possession of your soul. You haven’t died yet, but you no longer have the strength and desire to live further, and it seems that it will always be like this now. And then your mother will enter your dark room. She won't ask what happened to you and won't even console you. She will just sit on the edge of the sofa, take your hand, stroke your head, start talking about something completely unimportant for either her or you... In general, she won’t do anything special. But you will suddenly feel that the black bag of despondency in which you spent several days is coming apart at the seams, and you are able to live again.
It turns out that love allows us to share with our loved ones the most important thing - vitality, the very possibility of being. On this principle, the Church bases the need to remember the dead, and the possibility of changing the posthumous fate of those whom we love and for whom we pray. Yes, the soul cannot change itself after death. But it can change thanks to the efforts of those who remained on earth and remember it.
The fact is that the Church is not just a formal association of people who believe in God. Christians constitute a single organism in the Church, in which the state of one organ determines the well-being of all the others. We are all living cells of the living Body of Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote amazing words about this: “...You are the body of Christ, and separately you are members,” and also: “The eye cannot say to the hand: I do not need you; or just head to feet: I don’t need you.” Physical death does not separate a person from the Body of Christ. But those spiritual illnesses that he did not cure during his lifetime can now be cured only by the effort of the whole organism; he is no longer able to do anything for himself.
How can one person spiritually help another, especially the deceased? Just like in the body one cell helps another that is affected by a disease. To suppress the inflammatory process in one part of the body, the body turns on immune processes, which throw all the body’s forces into fighting the disease. Healthy cells take on extra workload to help sick cells. Thus, in war, soldiers do not abandon a wounded comrade, but carefully carry him out from under fire, risking themselves in the process. So, during a hike, the burden of a person who sprains his leg is distributed among everyone.
But only a healthy person can help a sick person. This is the main principle of spiritual care. This is the essence of prayer for another person, living or deceased - it doesn’t matter. In order to help our neighbor, we ourselves must take care of our spiritual health in order to be able to share it with our loved one.
Suppose our neighbor was angry during his lifetime, loved to slander, was a drunken and gluttonous person, and was greedy. This means that we must learn to abstain from anger, control our tongues from evil speeches, observe fasts, give alms, etc. Simply put, we ourselves need to begin to live like a Christian and thereby gain the opportunity to share this life with our departed through prayer. Love realizes itself in sacrifice. And if our commemoration is based on such Christian self-sacrifice, it will become for the soul of a deceased person that very touch of love that can pour into him a part of our life in Christ.
Rich relative
In the conversation about commemorating the dead, an important question is often missed: who, in fact, needs such commemoration more - them, or ourselves? It would be endless arrogance and impudence to claim that one of our deceased loved ones has gone to hell, needs help and needs to be begged for.
Christians have a commandment not to judge their neighbor during their lifetime. It is all the more absurd to pronounce a sentence on someone who has already completed his earthly journey and has appeared before the judgment of God. We can worry about him, like parents worry about their son who has gone to study in a distant city. But we must not forget that we have a rich and loving relative in this city. Moreover, he is not just rich - he is the most important person in this city and decides all issues there, no matter what they concern. And we should not tear our hearts out with worries - this relative will take care of our son much better than we ourselves. But this concern does not prevent us from sending him letters, parcels with all sorts of goodies and pocket money. The son may not need anything, but our rich relative is very considerate, he does not deprive us of the opportunity to show our love in this way. And when we call and ask him: “Don’t leave our boy there, please! Look after him, help, otherwise we’re worried here!”, this does not mean at all that without our call the son would have been left without support and attention. We just love him, but he left and is now far away. And what else can we do to show our love and care? Just call and send letters with parcels. Likewise, we ourselves need prayer to Christ for our departed no less than those for whom we pray.
Because we all have such a rich relative. This is Christ, Who became man in order to make us His relatives in the flesh. But relatives are not judged impartially, they are judged with love. His court is not our court. It is enough to remember how many times in the Gospel Christ justifies and defends those whom people have condemned, and for the most just reasons.
Where is the soul after death
For centuries, humanity has been trying to understand what happens after death, whether it is possible to contact the afterlife. Different traditions give different answers to the question of whether the soul of a deceased person sees his loved ones. Some religions talk about heaven, purgatory and hell, but medieval views, according to modern psychics and religious scholars, do not correspond to reality. There is no fire, cauldrons or devils - only ordeal, if loved ones refuse to remember the deceased with a kind word, and if loved ones remember the deceased, they are in peace.
How many days after death is the soul at home?
Relatives of deceased loved ones wonder whether the soul of the deceased can come home, where it is after the funeral. It is believed that during the first seven to nine days the deceased comes to say goodbye to home, family, and earthly existence. The souls of deceased relatives come to the place that they consider truly theirs - even if an accident occurred, the death was far from their home.
What happens after 9 days
If we take the Christian tradition, then souls remain in this world until the ninth day. Prayers help to leave the earth easily, painlessly, and not get lost along the way. The feeling of the presence of the soul is especially felt during these nine days, after which the deceased is remembered, blessing him for the final forty-day journey to Heaven. Grief pushes loved ones to figure out how to communicate with a deceased relative, but during this period it is better not to interfere so that the spirit does not feel confused.
After 40 days
After this period, the spirit finally leaves the body, never to return - the flesh remains in the cemetery, and the spiritual component is cleansed. It is believed that on the 40th day the soul says goodbye to loved ones, but does not forget about them - heavenly stay does not prevent the deceased from monitoring what is happening in the lives of relatives and friends on earth. The fortieth day marks the second commemoration, which can already occur with a visit to the grave of the deceased. You should not come to the cemetery too often - it disturbs the buried person.
Our dead will not leave us in trouble...
It happens that the son who has left himself sends rich parcels and transfers to his parents. There are many examples in the history of the Church when prayerful communication with the departed helped the living solve their earthly problems. Here are some examples.
One priest's wife, whom he loved very much, died. The bitterness of the loss was too much for him to bear, and he began to drink. Every day he remembered her in his prayers, but he sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of alcoholism. One day a parishioner came to this priest and told her that his dead wife appeared to her in a dream and said: “Pour me some vodka.” “But you never drank during your life,” the parishioner was surprised. “My husband taught me this with his current drunkenness,” answered the deceased.
This story shocked the priest so much that he quit drinking forever. He subsequently became a monk. He died in the rank of bishop. His name was Vladyka Vasily (Rodzianko).
Another case. A student at the Theological Academy took the exam without knowing the material well enough. In the corridor on the wall hung portraits of scientists and theologians who taught at the academy over the years. The student prayerfully turned to one of the long-deceased teachers with a request to help him pass the exam. And I remembered for the rest of my life how obvious this help was. He passed the exam with excellent marks, all the time feeling the calm, benevolent support of the one to whom he turned. The student also became a monk, and then a bishop. This is Bishop Evlogy, Archbishop of Vladimir and Suzdal. And the portrait depicted the MDA teacher, Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), who was later canonized as St. Philaret of Moscow (by the way, Bishop Eulogius told this story when the Synod was collecting materials for the canonization of St. Philaret).
An amazing case of prayerful communication with the departed is described by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh. One day he was approached by a man who, during the war, accidentally shot his beloved girl, his fiancée. With one shot, he destroyed everything they had dreamed so much about together. A happy life after the war, the birth of children, study, his favorite job... He took all this not from someone, but from the closest and dearest person on earth. This unfortunate man lived a long life, repeatedly repented of his sin before the priests in confession, a prayer of absolution was read over him, but nothing helped. The feeling of guilt did not go away, although almost sixty years had passed since that ill-fated shot. And Vladika Anthony gave him unexpected advice. He said: “You asked forgiveness from God, whom you did not harm, you repented before the priests, whom you did not kill. Now try to ask forgiveness from this girl herself. Tell her about your suffering, and ask her to pray to the Lord for you.” Subsequently, this man sent a letter to the Vladyka, where he said that he did everything as he ordered and the icy splinter of guilt that had been sitting in his heart for many years finally melted. The prayer of the bride he killed turned out to be stronger than his own prayers.
And Metropolitan Anthony himself told how, in difficult moments of his life, he turned to his deceased mother with a request to pray for him, and many times received the expected help.
Vladimir Vysotsky once sang: “...Our dead will not leave us in trouble, our fallen are like sentries.” By leaving this life, our loved ones become closer to the Lord and can intercede for us before Him. That is why we pray to the saints who are canonized by the Church. But we must not forget that the Church considers saints not only the glorified saints of God included in the calendar. All Christians who are sanctified by the Most Pure Body and Blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist are called saints in the Church. And if our loved one was a member of the Church during his lifetime, confessed and partook of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, then we cannot have sufficient grounds to believe that after his death he needs our remembrance more than we need his prayers for us.
Saint Cyprian of Carthage wrote: “...We should not mourn our brothers who, at the call of the Lord, renounce the present age. We must rush after them with love, but in no way complain for them: we must not put on mourning clothes when they have already put on white vestments.”
