On Praying for One's Ancestors

A Christian Commemoration of Chinese Ancestors in Taiwan

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West) 

Today, April 4th, 2020, is the Chinese festival of Qingming, or "Grave Sweeping Day", a holiday when many East Asian cultures will go to visit the graves of their ancestors, sweep, read, cry, and leave gifts of food and incense on or near the graves. For many it is a sweet family picnic time, and for many, it is a time to retell the stories of days gone by and of people who live on within the family's collective memory. 

In many ancient cultures, ancestors are not perceived to be "dead and gone." No, they are perceived to live on, both spiritually in an afterlife and physically in their descendants. For this reason, in cultures as separate as Confucian China and Na Dene Native American tribes, Mayan pyramid builders and Egyptian pyramid builders, a concern with the eternal state of ones ancestors in built into the culture as a primary value. In the West, largely due to the Protestant Reformation's rejection of the Saints, the dead have become dead to us. We have lost the collective will to remember our past, our ancestors, or to think of them as present in our lives in any way. We no longer have the "cloud of witnesses" of an ever-present ancestral community in our collective consciousness, and we see ourselves as both supreme individuals, forging our own destiny without help or inheritance, but we also see our inner lives as invisible and unaccountable to God or man.

In China, a culture that is very concerned with the eternal state of their ancestors, we began to see the point to many of these very non-Western cultural questions. Holy Orthodoxy comforted our hearts with the knowledge that God did not hate the unbaptized pagan and still held them in His life-giving embrace as much as He loves and upholds the souls of the great heroes and martyrs of the faith. St. Isaac the Assyrian explains that the heat and fire of Hell is just the unwanted embrace of God's light and love, and that the only thing that separates the experience of Heaven and Hell is our will to receive them. With salvation, we receive them and internalize them, being transformed by them and united with God. With those who have not received Baptism and lived a life of repentance and sanctification, this experience in external and is experienced with pain and regret, as sin was never excised from life and still forms a large part of the person's identity. On the last day, we have hope that those who never heard the message of Christ's Gospel will still have a choice in their resurrected bodies to follow Jesus, and so we pray for the dead, asking God to have mercy on those who died outside of the Kingdom, and asking for mercy in the Last Judgment. There is no "law" that saves any of us, only Christ's mercy.

Based on these basic realizations, we embrace Chinese holidays for the commemoration of Ancestors. We set up a table like the Chinese traditionally do, we set it for all the living and the dead, and we place holy icons on the table so that we can see that Christ has invited all to His table. We explain this as an icon of the Kingdom of Heaven, just like the Proskomedia in the Orthodox Tradition, where the priest builds a little icon of the Kingdom of Christ and His Saints on the paten before the offering of the Bread and Wine in the Liturgy. It is not a Eucharist, but is a picture of what the Eucharist does, binding us all up into one, and showing how Christ presides over all the living and the dead as their loving Savior, imparting life, and making it possible for us to be re-united with our loved ones.

We do this, praying the "Akathist for the Repose of the Departed" and reading out all the names of the ancestors of families in our village, on the traditional Chinese days of commemoration - "Grave Sweeping Day", and the anniversaries of death for various famous ancestors. This has become a well loved substitute for ancestor worship, and we even have non-Christian friends and family come by to have us remember their ancestors and ask for Christ's mercy on them in the next world.

Liturgy is about embodiment in time and space, in community, manifesting dynamic relationships through symbols and face to face interactions. I hope that a place can be established to practice these things, either with you there in Japan, or in Thailand, where we can come together to formalize these rituals in a way that will honor the Church’s canonical inheritance and the necessities of East Asian cultural expression, and create a more tangible link between cultural sphere, like Mateo Ricci was trying to do in the “Chinese Rite,” and perhaps what we see in the Jingjiao Stele and Ancient Chinese version of the Te Deum (三威蒙度赞).

True Christianity teaches salvation through Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, the 2nd person of the Holy Trinity. It proclaims His Gospel, while retaining the mastery that we do not know or understand everything, and that the Last Day is entirely in God's hands. Faith does not save us (as a fancy or a feeling), only Jesus does. Therefore, we hope in His mercy, cry out for His salvation, and trust Him to do what is ultimately right and good, because His life and love are the only definitions of good. 

Prayer:

Have mercy, O Lord, on all those ancestors who have died, without knowledge of the Truth of Thy Holy Word, not receiving the cleansing and remission of sins through Holy Baptism, and not able to receive Thee in  the Holy Sacraments for the perfection of faith and the work of sanctification, because of the absence of Thy One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.  In Thine inestimable love and mercy, show pity on those souls whom Thou alone canst see, and save all those who do repent on the Last Day, when Thou judgest both the quick and the dead, and all mankind must give account before Thy throne for all of the deeds done in our bodies. If it be in Thy will, save those who have died in innocent ignorance and in expectation of the salvation of the Lord of Heaven. If this require our sacrifice or taking up of some part of their suffering, let it be according to Thy will, so that we all may be together with Thee in paradise for all eternity, together with Thine only Son, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.