The room is fuller than it looks
Walk into an Orthodox church on a weekday morning and you may find eight people, a reader, and a priest. Look at the walls and the count changes. The icons are not illustrations of absent people; they are arranged the way a congregation is arranged, facing in, and the building is designed to make a visitor feel outnumbered.
That is the doctrine in architectural form. Orthodox Christians believe that the Church has members who have died and that those members did not resign. The small congregation at a Wednesday Liturgy is the visible fraction of something much larger, and the service assumes the rest are present rather than remembered.
This article sets out what that belief is, where it comes from, and what changes when a community actually lives by it. Of the practices Protestant visitors find strange, this one is the least contested in principle and the most far-reaching in effect.
Where the phrase itself comes from
Honesty first: the phrase communion of saints is not Orthodox in origin. It belongs to the Apostles' Creed, a Western creed which the Orthodox Church does not use in its services. What Orthodox Christians confess at every Liturgy is the Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople, finished in 381, which says instead: one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
The Latin phrase, sanctorum communionem, is also famously ambiguous, and commentators have long pointed out that it can mean either the communion of holy persons or communion in holy things. Both senses turn out to matter, because in Orthodox practice the fellowship of the saints and the sharing of the Eucharist are not two topics but one.
It helps to remember what the apostolic writings mean by saints. Paul addresses ordinary, quarrelling congregations as saints: those at Rome are called to be saints, those at Corinth are called saints, and so are the Philippians. The word marks people set apart in baptism, not an elite. On that usage, the communion of saints includes the reader who overslept and the visitor at the back.
Hebrews 12, and the tense of the verbs
The text Orthodox Christians reach for first is Hebrews. After the long roll of the faithful in chapter 11, the writer turns to his readers: “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight” (Hebrews 12:1, KJV). The Greek word for witnesses is the one that gives us martyrs, and it carries both senses at once, those who testified and those who watch.
A few verses later the same chapter becomes startling. “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn... and to the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:22-24, KJV). The tense is not future. The readers are told they have already arrived.
Orthodox worship takes that sentence at face value and builds accordingly. If Christians assembling on earth have come to the heavenly Jerusalem, to angels and to the spirits of the righteous, then a church service is a meeting of two congregations that turn out to be one.
Death does not dismember the body
The underlying claim is about what kind of thing the Church is. Paul calls it a body, and says of that body that “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26, KJV). Bodies do not shed limbs at funerals, and Orthodoxy has never been able to see how a member of Christ could stop being one by dying.
Christ's own argument about the resurrection points the same way. Of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, long buried, he says that God “is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him” (Luke 20:38, KJV). Paul adds that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and separation from Christ's love would be the only thing that could sever the connection.
From those two convictions everything else in this article follows. If the departed are alive in Christ, and if the living are joined to Christ, then the living and the departed are joined to one another. It is not a mystical extra. It is the ordinary consequence of taking the metaphor of the body literally.
What it does to worship
The clearest picture is in the service of preparation before the Liturgy. The priest cuts a square from the first loaf, the Lamb, which will become the Body of Christ. From other loaves he cuts small particles: one for the Theotokos, others for the ranks of saints, then particles for living people whose names have been handed in, and particles for the departed. All of them are placed on one dish, around the Lamb.
At the end of the Liturgy those particles are put into the chalice, with a prayer that the sins of all those commemorated may be washed away by the precious Blood of Christ. A visitor watching from the nave will not see it happen. What is being enacted on that small dish is the whole of this doctrine: living and dead, in one company, gathered around one centre who is Christ.
The calendar says the same thing more slowly. Every day of the year carries the memory of particular Christians, and the Sunday after Pentecost is kept as the Sunday of All Saints, so that the Church's first act after receiving the Holy Spirit is to point at the people the Spirit produced. A congregation that keeps that calendar is being introduced to its own relatives, one day at a time.
What it does to grief
Orthodoxy does not ask the bereaved to stop grieving, and any presentation of it that suggests otherwise has gone wrong. Paul writes that Christians should not sorrow “even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, KJV), which regulates the sorrow rather than forbidding it. At the grave of a friend four days dead, knowing what he was about to do, Jesus wept.
What the Church offers instead is work to do. There are prayers on the third, the ninth and the fortieth days after a death, and on the anniversary. There is the panikhida, a short memorial service that can be served in a home or at a graveside. There are memorial Saturdays through the year, when whole parishes read out long lists of names, and in Russian practice there is Radonitsa in the weeks after Pascha, when families take the Paschal greeting to the cemetery.
Small details carry a good deal of this. Boiled wheat is brought for memorial services, because of the grain that must fall into the ground and die before it bears fruit. At the end the congregation sings Memory Eternal, which is not a wish that the dead be remembered by us, since our memories are short, but a prayer that they be held in the memory of God, which is not.
Grief handled this way does not become smaller, but it stops being private. A widow in the parish has somewhere to take her husband's name on a Saturday morning, and a hundred other people say it out loud with her.
Where Christians differ here, and where they do not
A great deal of this is shared ground, and it would be dishonest to stage a disagreement that is not there. Most Protestant Christians confess the communion of saints, hold that believers who have died are with Christ, and expect to see them again. The hymn about the saints of God who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved is sung in a great many churches on the first of November.
The difference is about whether the relation is active now, and in both directions. Orthodoxy holds that the saints pray for the Church on earth and that the Church on earth prays for its departed, and it puts both into its services every week. Many Protestant traditions hold that the departed are with Christ and leave it there, partly out of a real concern that traffic across that boundary would crowd Christ out of the middle.
That concern deserves a straight answer rather than a debating point. In the Orthodox Liturgy the whole company, living and departed, is arranged around one thing, and it is not a saint. If the arrangement ever stops pointing at Christ, the arrangement has failed, and the Church's own hymns are the first witnesses against it.
these people are warm, loving people who obviously love Christ
Fr. Seraphim Rose, lecture “Orthodoxy in the USA”, The Orthodox Word no. 94 (1980), quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 86
The feast this parish is named for
This parish is the Parish of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and the feast it carries, kept on 15 August in the church calendar, is a death. Dormition means falling asleep. The Church spends a fortnight preparing for it, fasts before it, buries an icon-shroud with hymns borrowed from Holy Friday, and then sings about it for days afterwards with unmistakable happiness.
The icon of the feast explains the whole argument at a glance. The apostles stand around a bier; behind it Christ stands holding a small child wrapped in white, which is his mother's soul. The roles from the Nativity are reversed, and the point is made without a word: she once held him as an infant, and now he holds her. This is what the Church thinks dying in Christ looks like.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, who came to Orthodoxy from a Protestant family in California, spent much of his last years telling Orthodox converts how to speak to the people they had left behind. He held the traditional Orthodox teaching about the Church without softening it, and refused to draw conclusions about where any individual stands before God, preferring a formula he had from Fr. Dimitry Dudko.
Anyone is welcome at the vigil on Saturday evening and at the Liturgy on Sunday morning in Kovan. Bring the names of your own dead if you like; they can be given to the priest before the service, and they will be read. That is not a request to agree with everything on this page. It is an ordinary courtesy extended by one part of a family to another.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)