What the practice looks like
A visitor to an Orthodox parish on a Saturday morning will often notice a small table set to one side: a candle, a tray of boiled wheat sweetened with honey, and a folded slip of paper with names written on it. The service that follows is short, perhaps fifteen minutes. It is called a panikhida, and it is sung for people who have died, some of them last week and some of them forty years ago.
Names are also handed in quietly before the Divine Liturgy. At the preparation of the bread the priest removes a particle for each name, living and departed, and these particles are later placed into the chalice with a prayer that their sins be washed away by the Blood of Christ. In a parish like ours in Singapore the slips carry names from a dozen countries and several languages. Nothing in the rite asks whether the person was important.
The third day, the ninth day, the fortieth
Orthodox commemoration follows a rhythm that strikes most newcomers as oddly precise. The departed are prayed for especially on the third day after death, on the ninth and on the fortieth, and then on anniversaries. Archbishop John Maximovitch, in his homily “Life After Death”, teaches that on the fortieth day the soul's place is appointed until the resurrection of the dead, and that until then changes in its condition remain possible.
These numbers carry meaning rather than mechanism. The third day is read against the Resurrection on the third day. The ninth is associated with the nine ranks of angels. The forty recall the forty days of Christ's fast and the forty days before his Ascension. Most parishes will arrange for a newly departed person to be commemorated at the Liturgy daily for forty days. Families often find the structure a mercy, because grief is given somewhere to go and something to do.
Radonitsa, and the Saturdays of the dead
After Pascha the Church waits a week and a half and then takes the Resurrection out to the cemetery. Radonitsa falls on the Tuesday of the second week after Pascha, in what is called St Thomas week. On that day Orthodox Christians go to the graves of their families and greet the dead with the Paschal hymns. The name is built on a Slavonic word for gladness. Leaving food and drink on graves belongs to older local custom and not to the mind of the Church.
Set beside Radonitsa are the parental Saturdays, on which the whole Church rather than individual families commemorates all the departed. In Russian practice these include the Saturday before Meatfare Sunday, the second, third and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent, the Saturday before Pentecost, and the Saturday before the autumn feast of St Demetrius of Thessalonica. Saturday in general is the day kept for the departed, which is why memorial services usually fall then.
The Paschal visit to the graves is not a Slavic invention. Preaching in his homily on the cemetery and the cross, St John Chrysostom asks why the Christians of his own city left their churches in the week after Pascha and gathered outside the walls among the tombs, and answers that it was because Christ had gone down to the dead, and because the burial ground is properly called a place of sleep.
The oldest evidence
The custom is older than any argument produced for it. Second-century epitaphs ask the reader to pray for the one buried. The inscription of Abercius of Hierapolis, who died around the year 167, asks that whoever understands it should pray for him. In the Roman catacombs the same request appears scratched in a few words: peace, refreshment, a name, sometimes a date.
Liturgical texts follow quickly. St Cyril of Jerusalem, instructing the newly baptised in his Mystagogical Catecheses in the fourth century, describes the eucharistic prayer in which the Church remembers those who have fallen asleep, and argues that the offering is of real benefit to them. St John Chrysostom says much the same in his third homily on Philippians: the remembrance of the departed in the awesome mysteries was appointed by the Apostles, and it is not an empty gesture. Every ancient eucharistic prayer, East and West, contains such a commemoration.
Second Maccabees, and a real difference about the canon
The text most often cited in this connection is 2 Maccabees 12:44–45. After a battle, Judas Maccabeus has a collection taken up and sent to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of soldiers who had died wearing forbidden amulets, and the writer commends the act as holy and pious, made in view of the resurrection. It is the clearest pre-Christian Jewish witness to prayer for the dead that has survived.
Here a genuine difference has to be stated rather than smoothed over. The Orthodox Church receives 2 Maccabees as Scripture, following the Greek Septuagint from which the Apostles usually quoted, and reads it among the books of the older covenant; some Orthodox writers give these books a distinct name, anagignoskomena, meaning books that are read, without removing them from the Bible. Roman Catholics call them deuterocanonical. The churches of the Reformation followed the shorter Hebrew canon and printed them in a separate section headed Apocrypha, as the King James Bible of 1611 did, and later confessional documents stated plainly that they are not part of the canon of Scripture.
That is a difference in the received list of books, not a mistake on anyone's part to be scored. It is also worth saying that Orthodox practice does not stand or fall with this one passage. The Church was already praying for its dead before it had settled lists of books at all, and would have gone on doing so if 2 Maccabees had never been written. The liturgy came first. The proof texts were gathered afterwards, as proof texts usually are.
Why many Protestant Christians do not pray for the dead
Evangelical and Reformed Christians who decline this practice are not being careless, and most of them are not thinking about Maccabees at all. Their conviction is about Christ. If his death has settled the question of a believer's standing before God, then praying for a Christian who has died can look like asking for something already fully given, or worse, like hinting that the work on the cross was incomplete. That is a serious reason, and it is held by serious people.
Three further reasons deserve the same respect. There is the canon, as above. There is the weight of Hebrews 9:27, that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment, which many read as closing the file at the moment of death. And there is history: the late-medieval traffic in indulgences fastened itself precisely onto prayer for the dead, and the Reformers' revulsion at that abuse was moral before it was doctrinal. Anyone who has read the sixteenth-century sources will understand it.
Something else is worth noticing without making an argument out of it. Many Christians who would never ask for a memorial service still speak to their dead at a graveside, and still say “God rest her” without meaning it as a doctrine. The Orthodox would say the instinct is sound and older than the objection to it. But the objection is a real one, and it is better answered with an explanation than with a rebuke.
In the Protestant world, we have many examples of people with soft hearts, who, for the love of Christ, are kind to other people.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, talk on simplicity, 1979, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 87
What Orthodox Christians mean by the prayers
Orthodoxy does not teach that prayers work on God like a lever, or that a quantity of suffering is paid off by the living on behalf of the dead. When St Mark of Ephesus set out the Orthodox position at the Council of Florence in 1438 and 1439, he affirmed that the departed are helped by prayers, by the Eucharist and by deeds of charity, and denied that there is a third place between heaven and hell, or a cleansing fire in the interval, or a debt of punishment still owed once sin has been forgiven.
Behind the practice lies a doctrine of the Church rather than a theory about the afterlife. The Church is one body, and death does not strike a member off the roll. That is why Orthodox Christians ask the saints to pray for them and pray for their own departed in the same breath, and why at the kneeling prayers of Pentecost vespers the Church dares to offer a petition even for those in hell. A love that stopped at the grave would be a smaller thing than the love Christians are commanded to have.
A door left open
Fr Seraphim Rose, an American hieromonk who came to Orthodoxy out of a Protestant family and wrote for readers much like his own relatives, refused to turn a difference of this kind into a weapon. He held the traditional Orthodox teaching about the Church without softening it, and in the same letter he wrote that judging where any particular person stands before God is not our business.
He was also capable of plain admiration for Christians outside his own Church, and said so in public as well as in private. In a talk given in 1979 he warned Orthodox Christians against imagining that correctness without warmth would still count as Christianity, and he pointed to Protestant neighbours as the evidence that a soft heart is basic Christianity rather than an optional refinement.
If you have lost someone and would like their name read here, you can simply give it to the priest; in most parishes there is no charge and no interview. Names of Orthodox Christians are commemorated at the Liturgy itself, and practice varies for the non-Orthodox departed, so it is worth asking. The Church's habit is to pray, to keep praying, and to leave the outcome where it belongs.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 84