The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on February 23, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Within a few short months, I lost both my grandpa and a dear mentor friend. It had been over a decade since I lost someone close to me. As I sat in prayer with each of their passing, I recognized that I was showing up to prayer-through-death in a different way than before.
Years earlier, when my grandma passed away, my prayer-through-death was a prayer-for-her. Once she was gone, we either prayed for her or asked her to pray for us, but in either case, there was a perceived distance, a separation. Consequently, my prayers-for-her felt rather impersonal and isolated.
More recently, the prayers-though-death did not feel distant. On the contrary, I felt closer to each person who had passed! Their presence felt more constant and intimate. My sense was that THIS! must be what Catholic Christians claim to connect to through the communion of saints. Of course, we have “formal” communal prayers in weekly worship and daily liturgy of the hours. But this most recent state of prayer-though-death is more informal than those public gatherings; it is a praying-with (rather than a praying-to) that deepens the interconnections between each of us as individual persons.
Truly, our weekly, public communion celebrations are a foretaste of the eternal, informal communion of saints, the long lineages of which both speak to a deeper union from which the Holy one is always and already drawing us closer into the union of communion.
