THE DEAD IN A WEB OF PRAYER
Praying for the dead, addressing the dead in prayer, and in addressing them, expecting the dead to be able to do something that affects God or the living: these categories have vexed Anglicans since the Reformation. Prayers for and to the dead were certainly evident in the early Church, though Scriptural witness lacks explicitness (see e.g. 2 Maccabees 12:43ff; 2 Timothy 1.16ff). The joint practice of Churches East and West continued elements of this in regular commemorations such as litanies of saints, and the festal celebrations and popular festivities of All Saints’ and All Souls’ along with occasional requiem masses and memorial services. Right from the founding of Anglicanism, Reformation objections multiplied, stirred up by extreme forms of devotional piety to saints, misuse of indulgences and mass stipends, and purgatorial accountancy. Anglican discourse since has sought to differentiate itself from Roman Catholic practice on one hand and Reformed strictures on the other. Such as had sympathies for traditional devotions, such as the Laudians and Tractarians, have allowed for personal beliefs and practices that call for a life lived with the communion of saints. At the internal boundary with the Reformed camp, the undeniable reality of eternal life was set alongside accepted doctrines of prayer to show that praying for the dead — advocation — could be allowed, though coming up against the more stringent predestinarianisms that saw it as questioning God’s already-made decision. Invocation, asking the dead to pray for those alive, was seen as tied to a more speculative notion of the interval between death and eschatological resurrection, and moved to the private sphere of adiaphora.
This stalemate between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics persisted through the 1971 Church of England Archbishops’ Commission on Christian Doctrine, whose justification for a minimalist approach to prayers for the dead is telling of the polarized tension:
Those of us who believe and practise prayer for the departed do so as an expression of our confidence that God holds them in his mercy, while of those us who refrain from making this type of prayer do so (at least in part) because we feel that the restraint itself shows the greatest possible confidence in the love and mercy of God. (Prayer and the Departed, p.16)
The emergence of new digital technology as a forum for interacting with the dead might be useful in breaking the impasse: how do these relate to traditional forms of modern and premodern ways of relating to the dead, and how might these be read theologically, situated historically in church practices, as well as under doctrinal analysis?
Robert Orsi, historian of American Catholicism, describes the shift to modern rituals of death in History and Presence:
Once the wake had been thus rendered fully rational and respectable, the sense of community, which had been reinforced by the old wakes, drained away, Catholic critics said. The contemporary Catholic wake ‘is not a place to come for companionship,’ but ‘for furtive prayer and uncomfortable sorrow’ that reflects ‘the hurried pace of a sophisticated America and the demise of regional unity.’ [...] Writing for each other in this new age of death and dying, priests emphasized the private nature of death and mourning.
Picture a pre-digital scene: the dying de-instrumentalized body in intensive care, being acted on by machines and doctors, prayed over by faith healers, called back by weeping relatives. Then after death, the family distraught, lives disrupted, unable to engage in normal social interactions, isolated, introspective, insulated from any further contact with the deceased, packing effects away, cleaning the house, creating a new life without the departed. Where are the liturgies and rituals that facilitate community support by making sense of the void?
In our current digital transition, the dying have been given means for a greater sense of agency in the process of moving towards death through sharing their trials via social media with the wider world. Cancer blogs, e.g. by Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Sacks, are now a genre. Interaction with the content producer is possible, as is the formation of communities of strangers around these narratives. The dying person’s role as an actor becomes emphasized rather than as an object acted upon by unimpedable biological processes, by arcane medical technology, by the emotional demands of loved ones. Rather than losing agency on the way to death, they regain it, usually also breaking the physical barrier by leaving a last testament to be read after their death, as with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
The narrative drive of the active process of blogging, tweeting, instagramming trials and tribulations takes away from death and dying some of the stigma that marks it as ontologically unbridgable, something to be hidden, something that we have no power over. The language used here is meant to evoke Christian language about death — Christ’s resurrection has fundamentally effaced any gulf that makes death terra incognito. Digital media can help disrupt our perception of the inevitable linearity and boundedness of death. We often encounter tweets in the middle of conversations, or only catch portions of goings-on in feeds. Prompted by Facebook, we might still send the deceased birthday wishes without knowing; the dead may still get recommendations and personalized advertisements. The digital revolution opens up innumerable personal narratives for us, shifting the balance between already-processed hagiography and the reality of life, opening a wider spectrum of living to the transformative lens of the Paschal narrative.
We live in the post-resurrection world where we glimpse time from a divine perspective as the already-not yet, re-envisioned every Sunday at the Eucharist. Here, the Church Penitent, the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant are all current realities, not separate windows or desktops we can close, but occupy the same memory space, the same bandwidth, influencing each other not just materially through bits and bytes, relics and texts, but by the dynamic ongoing mediation of human affect and memory.
These digital remains were at some point contiguous with a living person but now are dynamically affecting us based on interactions with people other than the original subject. If we allow that there can be non-human agents that affect us, what then is the status of speaking to and hearing from the dead, directly or indirectly? Does playing with the saved ghost car of your deceased father in an Xbox game connect you with the saints in a way that lives on in Latin American saint-centered religiosity, African cultural memory, or Confucian ancestor veneration, but perhaps was not common in modern Western society? Colin Davis proposes while discussing de Man and Levinas in “Can the Dead Speak to Us?”:
“in the process of attending to the words of the dead, however erroneous or mystified this might be, our own subject position is disturbed. [...] The dead may not speak in any literal sense, but they do signify, since the survivor continues to be the uncomprehending addressee of signs which cannot be attributed to any living subject. Death is both nonsense and a breach which opens up sense to unsuspected possibilities.”
Digitality does not revolutionize this relationship in any fundamental reality-changing way, but it does make it harder to blind ourselves to these possibilities, which we can read in light of the Eucharistic re-imagination of memory and communication across time and space, the crossing of death as key to our understanding of divine-human interaction. As Rowan Williams comments in Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology: “the ‘common task’ is the restoration of true kinship between agents, and indeed between the agents of the past and the present.”
Given that theologically and philosophically we can consider treating the dead as agents, how about asking the dead to pray for us? Or, equivalently: how about asking the dead questions by instant messenger?
To respect them as persons, perhaps we should not. Rather than constrain them with our expectations, perhaps we could relate to them as free agents and focus on what we ourselves are thinking, and saying and doing.
Rowan Williams, in a 2009 radio talk, says of prayer:
I'm not trying to fill up the space, I'm not trying to do something, but I'm trying almost to be carried on that 'rising water'. There is a line from T S Eliot's Four Quartets: 'And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight' (No. 1: Burnt Norton) which is a beautiful image of something rising up; but for that to happen you have to let go of a lot. You have to still your body and your imagination and let something flower, let something happen, and sooner or later your mind and your feelings have to get out of the way. So prayer is communion, it's that allowing the depth within and the depth outside to come together.
By speculating in a cataphatic mode and clarifying some of our intuitions about the dead, perhaps we could bring some of our conclusions back to our relations with the living, and with God. Even with the dead, we understand the need to draw back from imposition. In listening to Anglican speculations about our spiritual communion with the dead, might we learn more about possibilities for our spiritual communion with the living?
