By Father Steven Kostoff
Taken in isolation, “remembrance of death”—especially among those who “have no hope” [1 Thessalonians 4:13]—can have a horrible effect upon the soul. It only makes sense to forget about it! The Christian practice of the “remembrance of death” needs to be the result of a lively faith in Christ, the Vanquisher of death, for it to be the spiritually positive practice it is meant to be. Saint Paul has said it with an unmatched clarity and eloquence from the very dawn of Christianity: “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” [1 Corinthians 15: 17-22].
From an intolerable reality that leaves us as creatures to be pitied, death itself becomes a passage to life in the risen Lord. Saint John Chrysostom could therefore write, “what was the greatest of evils, the chief point of our unhappiness, what the devil had introduced into the world, in a word, death, God has turned into our glory and honor.” With the powerful words of both the Apostle Paul and Saint John in mind, we can fully understand what Father John Breck further relates in his chapter about the thought of death: “Our physical death remains before us, certainly and inevitably. But is has been emptied of its power. For those who are ‘in Christ,’ true death occurs at baptism, when we go down into the baptismal waters, then rise up from them, in a mimesis, or reactualization, of Christ’s own death and resurrection. Baptism effects a ‘new birth,’ but only because it signifies the death of the ‘old Adam,’ or former being” [page 101].
The daily practice of the “remembrance of death” is a Christian practice that—besides its realism as mentioned above—allows us to further meditate upon the overflowing love of God that has been poured out for our salvation in Christ, the “Coming One,” Whose death has overcome death, fully revealed in His glorious resurrection. It may not be the most timely subject for dinnertime conversation or the banter of the workplace; but it has a crucial and time-honored place in our prayer life and in our “search” for those essential truths upon which we meditate throughout the course of our lives. Imbued with a Christian realism that we embrace with open eyes and the virtue of hope that leaves the future open-ended, we can consciously avoid the foolishness of the rich man of the parable, but rather heed the teaching of Saint James: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.’ Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall do this or that’” [James 4:13-15].
~Website of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA): https://oca.org/reflections/fr.-steven-kostoff/the-remembrance-of-death.
