Remembering Someone in Prayer
While shopping, we may notice something a person who has died would have liked and think, for a moment, of buying it for them. Then we remember they are gone, and the loss feels close again. So much of caring for someone took the form of things we could do.
Making a cup of coffee the way they like it, or offering a ride to an appointment, gave that care a familiar shape. Death brings these things to an end. The wish to care can remain with nowhere familiar to go. Even when a death was expected, knowing what has happened is different from learning how to live with the absence.
A systematic review of 79 studies, published online in Death Studies in 2023, found that ongoing bonds with someone who has died can bring both comfort and distress. For some people, those bonds also affirmed their spiritual beliefs. We can be grateful for someone’s life and still find their absence hard to bear.
On All Souls’ Day, the Church invites us to bring those memories into prayer. We ask God to forgive those who have died and welcome them into the fullness of life with him. Catholic faith holds that our prayers can help them. The person we miss is someone we can still love and pray for.
Catholics believe that a person can die in friendship with God and still need to be made ready for heaven. God cleanses that person of the sin that remains in them. The Church calls this final preparation purgatory. Their place in heaven is assured, and our prayers can help them as God makes them ready.
We cannot know another person’s heart as God does, and we should not try to pronounce a final judgment on their life. Nor do we need to make an account of that life that leaves out everything difficult. Anyone who has loved another person knows something about the limits of such accounts. Even a close relationship leaves much that we never understood about the other person. God knows the person we are bringing to him. We can ask for mercy without pretending to know all that mercy must accomplish.
The hope behind that request rests in Christ. In one of the Gospel readings offered for All Souls, Jesus speaks of receiving those who come to him and raising them on the last day. We entrust the people we love to the one who makes that promise.
Saint Benedict’s counsel about prayer can help with the words. In chapter 20 of his Rule, he asks for humility and purity of heart, and makes room for prayer to be brief. He is teaching a monastic community how to pray. We can draw from that counsel when grief makes a long prayer difficult, or when there simply seems to be nothing new to say. A person’s name and a plain request for God’s mercy give us a place to begin.
You might choose one person to remember in prayer today. Say their name, then ask God to forgive them and welcome them into his presence. If words are difficult, a familiar prayer can carry the request. There is no need to produce a fresh account of the relationship each time. You can return to the same prayer tomorrow.
Such prayer may leave the sorrow much as it was. A difficult memory may remain difficult. We are allowed to pray without treating relief as evidence that we have done it well. The person for whom we pray is still the one we want God to help. Our love for them can take this form even on a day when we feel distracted or tired.
All Souls also makes room for people whose names we never knew, and for those who have no one left to remember them. After praying for someone close to us, we can include them too. Our prayer can extend beyond the circle of our own loss. We need not know someone’s story to ask that they receive mercy.
Whom can I entrust to God’s mercy today?
Sources
Saint Benedict, Rule, chapter 20, Brian Junyor’s 2026 edition.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 958, 1030 to 1032 and 1861.
Helen Hewson, Niall Galbraith, Claire Jones and Gemma Heath, The impact of continuing bonds following bereavement: A systematic review, Death Studies, published online June 19, 2023.