15th March is the first Memorial Saturday of Great Lent. Do we understand the essence and meaning of our prayers for the reposed? Do we know how important these prayers are?

I personally had to experience, through the example of our family, what it means to pray together for the deceased. After my grandmother passed away, she began to appear in the dreams of relatives in a very distressed state, asking for help and support. We organised ourselves and began to pray simultaneously for her repose every day for forty days, each in our own home.

Time passed, and she appeared in a dream to her daughter. When asked how things were, my grandmother replied, “At first, it was very bad, dark, cold, scary, and drowsily, but now it is very good.”

We are not ascetics, saints, or great men of prayer. We are ordibnary, sinful people, without any hint of anything special. And we prayed most simply, reading prayers from the prayer book, and I served the Litia – just as usual. But, as some would say today, “it works”. And all of us need to know this! God hears even us – common, sinful, imperfect people, very far from true holiness. And not only does He hear, but He also accepts our prayers, shows mercy and forgiveness. Of course, hundreds of such stories can be read today, but there is a difference between reading them and having one’s own experience.

  • LovstuhagenOPMEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    There is an interesting passage in Maccabees that implies that Jews previously believed that there could be a process for atoning for the sins of the dead:

    In II Maccabees 12:39-46, we discover Judas Maccabeus and members of his Jewish military forces collecting the bodies of some fallen comrades who had been killed in battle. When they discovered these men were carrying “sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear” (vs. 40), Judas and his companions discerned they had died as a punishment for sin. Therefore, Judas and his men “turned to prayer beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out… He also took up a collection… and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honorably… Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.”

    There is also this passage in Matthew 5:24-25:

    Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison; truly I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny (Matthew 5:25-26).

    Catholic.com

    I think these hint at a period before heaven in which some form of atonement is possible, though I am not sure to what extent it fits the Catholic concept of purgatory as such.