Dead Prayers

In general, other than at a funeral close to the time of death, I do not say prayers for people who are already dead. I pray for the grieving, for those who continue to mourn, for those with unspoken pain, for the currently dying, for caregivers, for those with vocations surrounding the realities of death, for those tending to the many tasks that come with death. All of that, yes, but almost never directly for people who are long dead. 

That changed this summer as I visited cemeteries, happened upon graveyards, viewed countless war memorials, paid my respects where markers had worn away, and stood in places where blood watered fields. 

I went to the cemetery that holds the mass graves and some individual plots for the victims of the Lusitania disaster. I wept at markers for the dead of the Great War (WW1) and the Second World War and stood quietly at markers for the lost in individual battles. 

My son and I read through names on a memorial marker to the enslaved workers at Catoctin Iron Furnace, looking into the rippled ground under the trees where no markers still stand. 

We walked among marble and granite markers at Gettysburg and at other battlefields, where even unknown dead are acknowledged. 

In Iceland and in northern Scotland, I saw the many markers for children who died so young from things we can now prevent with vaccines. If we want to. One of the saddest sights for me will always be the tombstone of a man who outlived his beloved wife and children. By years. There are often many things we take for granted that he would have given anything to have. 

The Mule Shoe Salient at Spotsylvania is where I finally walked into the woods and cried so hard that I choked on my tears. It was not the first place I cried nor the last, but the air there is not peaceful. And I was finally exhausted, not from travel, but from the accumulation of sites and information about people who would rather die than let someone else be free. 

And this is where I tell you that early in these travels, in a very un-Lutheran way, I began to pray for the repose of souls, for light perpetual to shine on the dead, for those who died in bondage or pain to receive the deepest renewal of God’s peace. 

Theologically, I believe people are already at rest in God’s care. 

Psychologically, though, it was easier to pray for the dead than to pray that the living would learn from history. It was easier to pray for perpetual grace for those already gone than to pray that the folks who currently walk the earth would open their minds, soften their hearts, and love their neighbors in word and deed. War monument after war monument, battlefield after battlefield, tiny marker after tiny marker, it was easier to speak to the Divine about the dead than to, once again, plead for a world where we truly intend to do for one another what Jesus would have us do. 

I have rarely, if ever, taken the easier way in my life, but I did in these recent moments. It was just easier than accepting that we haven’t learned, we haven’t changed, and maybe we don’t want to. I won’t quit my work and I won’t quit praying, but I hope that someday someone will pray for me. Easy rest comes from God. Because there are people who will disturb it if they think they can.