Remembering our Dead

by Dr Raymond Perrier · November 30, 2014

November has been a month of remembrance. For Catholics, the �remembering� is tied to the feast of All Souls and a whole month of praying for those who have died.

Visitors look at the Tower of London�s poppy installation this month. The ceramic poppies commemorated the end of World War I. (Photo: Hannah McKay, EPA/CNS)

We might recall deceased loved ones on their birthdays or death anniversaries, but November provides a useful month to bring to mind all we miss, and to remember people we have perhaps forgotten. It is a defining characteristic of Catholic Christians that we do this; through candles, flowers, Mass offerings and prayer cards we have formal visible rituals for showing our remembrance.

Grief is so complex and subtle that such simple gestures can help with the process.

When I was working in a refugee camp, we created an easy ritual that we could take from chapel to chapel: people would write the names of loved ones who had died each on a small heart, and we would pin the hearts to a beautiful Kitenge cloth. People often only heard about deaths many months after the event, and had little chance of attending a funeral or visiting a grave, so something practical like this became a way of focusing the prayer.

We were soon asked though about that phrase �the faithful departed�: should we be praying only for Catholics who have died?

The idea of �praying for the dead� is a bit hard to get our heads round. We are certainly not praying that God will change his mind and re-assign someone from one form of after-life to a nicer one. Rather we are hopeful that our prayers will �speed� the soul�s journey to heaven, even if we are not sure what �speed� could mean in the dimension of eternity. But whatever our understanding of the value of praying for the dead, it is one that would have value for all the departed: Catholics, other Christians, followers of other faiths, and people of no formal faith. So we did not require baptismal certificates before we allowed names to be added to our cloth of remembrance.

As someone who usually says, �I�ll pray for him/her�, when told a person has died, I used to be at a loss about what to say to the relative of a non-Catholic who had died. But over the years, I have said to the mourners: �In our tradition we offer prayers for those who have died, so I hope that you find some comfort if I say that I will pray for your loved one�. I have never had anything other than a positive response.

Another form of remembrance associated with November�especially in Britain and former countries of the British Empire�is remembering all those who have died in warfare. The reason for this commemoration is that the �Armistice agreement� that ended the First World War was on signed on November 11 (poetically at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month). So that date and time have been used to mark the dead of all wars, combatants and non-combatants.

Just as Catholics use candles and Mass cards as physical symbols of the remembering, the tradition has built up in Britain�and I saw some in South Africa�of wearing an artificial poppy, a simple bright red flower recollecting the red flowers that bloomed in the fields between France and Germany and symbolic of the red blood that was shed there.

This year has seen the 100th anniversary of the start of that �war to end all wars�. I was impressed to hear that almost everyone in Britain � including young people usually with no interest in history � was wearing a poppy to show solidarity with the dead of 100 years ago and with those in the armed forces still sacrificing their lives today.

A commemoration that really caught people�s imagination was the moat around the Tower of London being filled with 888246 ceramic poppies. Each was about 60cm high and represented a WW1 military casualty from Britain or the Commonwealth. What was striking was not just the hundreds of thousands of poppies, but the tens of thousands of volunteers who helped make each one by hand, and the millions of people who travelled to see them personally as an act of remembrance.

But one of the most powerful acts of remembrance is also the most simple: a moment of silence. In fact the traditional Armistice two minutes of silence � one minute for those who died and the other for those who survived � was proposed to King George V by a South African, Percy FitzPatrick, author of Jock of the Bushveld.

I heard this silence in two different contexts recently in Durban. The first was the traditional setting of the war memorial and it was preceded by a lone bugler sounding the �Last Post�. Formal and exact and very British.

The second was more moving because it was so unexpected. It was at the magnificent Moses Mabhida Stadium and the crowd was noisy and excited before an important football international. But this was also the first national game since the tragic killing of Senzo Meyiwa, the captain of Bafana Bafana.

Silence was requested as a mark of respect. Initially it was ignored, but then, little by little, the shouting and the singing and even the vuvuzelas died down. And 30 000 people showed their need to remember in the simple act of spending one minute thinking not of themselves but of someone else.