As we come to the slow closing of this series of discussions that we’ve had in the last few weeks, speaking about the Orthodox life and the sacraments of the Church… We began five weeks ago with birth, with coming into this world, being born into this world. Today we come full circle, to the ending of our lives in this world, Christian death, leaving of this world, of this life, and entering into the next. It is something that many of us, of course, feel uncomfortable about talking about, because none of us want to think about our own death, our own lives ending on this planet, on this world. We don’t want to speak about it much, and yet, as Orthodox Christians, and if we read the Fathers of the Church and the saints’ lives, we see that they overcame their fear by faith and by speaking about it and by learning about it.

So even the traditions that we have that surround death, the death of one of our loved ones within the Church are very, very deep and very, very symbolic, and they’re there to give us hope, not to make us sad, not to give us despair. All the symbolisms, all the actions that we do when someone leaves this world, as a community, as a church, are extremely important, and it’s extremely important that we maintain them and that we follow them.

What are some of these traditions? because many of us may not know. Well, the first one, of course, and we’ve said this so many times before, is that whenever anything happens in our lives, any main change, any big life event, whether it be birth, whether it be sickness, whether it be marriage, whether it be anything, the first thing you do is you call your priest! Because the priest is the first one who is going to come and to pray for you. When someone passes away, the first thing that we should do—and unfortunately many people don’t do it any more—is that we call the priest. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the middle of the night.

We call the priest, and the priest comes and he does what is called the trisagion prayer. It is the basic prayer for those who have passed on. We pray for their souls immediately after the soul has left the body, so that God will take care of them. Then the second thing that we do is we arrange for the funeral customs of our community, of our Church. Those are extremely important, and we do those with our church first, before we go to funeral homes, before we speak to those who are not Orthodox, who maybe have different ideas about how to go about burying our dead. So some of these traditions are extremely important—actually, all of them are.

We see that when we go to funerals, the priest always wears white, which always represents the Resurrection. It’s always a happy color. He’s never supposed to wear purple or dark colors. We always place the icon of the Resurrection by our loved ones, both at the viewings, if you notice, if you ever go, and at the funerals. We always see this beautiful icon of the Resurrection right by the face of the person who has passed away. Why? So that we can emphasize the joy that that person is now beginning to experience, that foretaste of the kingdom. Even the savano, the burial shroud that we cover our loved one with at the end of the funeral service is covered with a beautiful icon of the Resurrection, symbolizing that hope, that joy, that that person, when we pray for them and we send them on their way, we honor the struggle that they made in their lives, trying to be a good person, trying to be a good Christian, trying to become that icon of Christ which we’ve spoken about so many times on so many different occasions.

So we do all these things because we have hope. One of the ultimate symbols of hope, believe it or not, are the kolyva that we make for our memorial services, that we have made today for a memorial service that we’re going to pray for at the end of service. One of the most beautiful symbols, and many people don’t even know why we boil wheat. Why? Why would we choose wheat out of any other thing to use? It’s very interesting that today’s gospel—again, I didn’t plan it like this, but today’s gospel has very much to do with this, because Christ speaks about the seeds falling on the bad soil, on the path, on the thorns, but in the good soil. And what happens to a seed, especially a grain of wheat, when it falls into the ground? It decomposes, it dies, in essence, but it produces a new plant. Then that produces fruit.

So Christ himself, in the gospel of John, right before he gets arrested, when he knows what’s coming—he knows he will be arrested and tortured and crucified, but he will rise again—he uses the example of the grain of wheat. He says that unless the grain falls into the ground and dies, it cannot produce fruit. He knows that he, too, had to go through this death and resurrection, as we, too, have the hope that we, too, will go through this death and resurrection. So this is why we use wheat: it’s one of the most ancient symbols of hope, of life, not of death. This is why also we mix it with sweet things, with sugar and with pomegranate and with raisins and all these sweet fruits of the earth: to remind us of the joy, not only of the great gift of life, of the blessing that we have had of how many years God blessed us on this planet, but especially of the joy of salvation, the hope of the salvation. That’s why we eat the kolyva, and we share them with one another, as a testament to our faith.

It’s important to do all these things and to continue to do these things when one of our loved ones [passes] away, so that we can continue to preach and to proclaim in this world the Resurrection. The one thing that definitely we should stay away from is buying into the teachings or the trends that are happening in our society today about death. What are those trends? To avoid it, to push it away, to dispose of our people via cremation and other means, to do funerals at funeral homes or at cemeteries away from the church. All these things are not accepted by the Orthodox Church.

We ask for our loved ones to come here. Why? Because this is our family. This is where we grew up. This is where we’re born. This is where we’re born spiritually, in baptism. This is where we grow. This is where we confess. This is where we receive our spiritual food. All these things we do here. When we get sick, what happens? The Church comes for us and helps us and anoints us and prays for us. All the things happen here, within the family, within the house of God. When one of our loved ones leaves us, it should happen here, in the Church.

So technically we are not supposed to be doing things outside the Church, just like we’ve spoken about before with the sacraments, but a lot of times what happens is that a lot of our people do not know these traditions, especially our younger generations. When someone passes away, the last person they call is the priest. The last person they seek out is the Church. So they don’t have any idea of what they should do, and they go to those people who are not Orthodox, whether they are spiritual or religious or not, and they make all the arrangements, and sometimes the arrangements are completely against the Orthodox faith or against the Orthodox tradition. Then the last person that is consulted is the priest, and by then it’s too late for us.

So many times we see that they say, “Well, why did the priest go to the funeral home to do the service?” Well, he went to the funeral home to do a service because he had no choice, because the people had already gone there, had already made their plans. It was too late after that, and of course the priest is going to accommodate, because we as Christians believe we will not let one of our brothers and sisters leave this planet without praying for them. So we go there, and yet we don’t like it, because it is not the proper context. It is not the proper way to say good-bye to our loved ones. So we have to teach these traditions and pass them on to our people, pass them on to our younger generation, so that they know what they mean, and so that we can continue to honor our people in the way that they deserve to be honored, to honor them as the living icons of God, even in death, to honor that icon of Christ that is within them, to honor their bodies even in death, to allow them to return back to the earth the way they came from the earth.

So all these things are extremely important for us to do and to continue to do. They give meaning to our lives, especially at the end of our life, at least on this planet, that we proclaim that resurrection, that we proclaim to everyone that this is not the end. We can’t do that when we eliminate all these things. We can’t do that when we destroy the body. We can’t do that when we pay no respect to our person who has been alive for so many years and we have lived with and we have experienced and all those things that make them who they are. The only way we do that is here, within our family which is the Church.