Orthodox Biz Blog

My ninety-one-year-old grandmother was in horrible pain. As she lay in the hospital bed, dehydrated and unable to even take her own medicines, she repeatedly cried out to God, "Lord, help me!"

My father and I sat at her bedside watching her struggle. "She's praying for healing," I said to my father, "I don't think God is going to answer that prayer. I think he's already rendered His judgment on this, and she's praying the wrong prayer."

A short time later, she suddenly switched her prayer. She cried out, "Lord, take me on!" She prayed that prayer three times. Then she became very still, as if sleeping. Within five minutes, I noticed she wasn't breathing.

"I guess she finally prayed the prayer that God was willing to answer," I said to my father as we verified that she was gone.

My grandmother, a devout Evangelical Christian, had finally departed this world amid unspeakable pain and suffering. It didn't have to be this way.

Granny had never wanted to die. She had fought to hang on to life with all her might. The previous year she had come home after five months in the hospital. Back then, even her own doctor had written her off. But her family hadn't. We believed she would recover, prayed she would recover. She believed and prayed also. And she, in fact, did recover enough to leave the hospital and go home.

But this time had been different. From the beginning of her final three-week stay in the hospital, it had been apparent that the end was coming. The power that had protected her in the past wasn't there.

But Granny wouldn't accept that fact. She wouldn't let go. Even with God's Will staring her in the face, she just couldn't give up her attachment to this world.

And why should she? What had her religious tradition, Charismatic Evangelicalism, ever done to prepare her for this?

Evangelicalism simply does nothing to prepare its adherents for death. This may seem strange, as one of the most common forms of witnessing is to ask a potential convert, "If you died today, would you spend eternity in Heaven or Hell?"

But this question is asked only to invite the sinner to say the sinners' prayer and accept Christ as his or her personal savior. Once that is done, death suddenly recedes from the picture and is replaced by all kinds of other more pleasant topics like personal finances, personal healing, and really cool rock tunes.

Evangelicals do not contemplate death, nor do they usually bring it up in church. When visiting a hospital, Evangelical pastors normally pray for God's healing mercy, right up until the end. I have never once heard an Evangelical pastor counsel a dying patient on how to die. It is just assumed that if one has a personal relationship with Jesus, such details will take care of themselves.

The problem is - they don't. Evangelicals simply don't know how to die, anymore than they know how to live. Evangelical churches don't know how to assist dying members. It is a topic they all try to avoid. Which is why my father and I found ourselves sitting alone, without clergy assistance, by the side of a dying woman who couldn't let go of this world.

The longer I am Orthodox, the more fully I appreciate the wisdom of the Church in its rituals preparing for and following death.

In Orthodoxy, our preparation for death starts (normally) long before we are actually facing our own mortality. Throughout our lives as Orthodox Christians, we constantly hear petitions such as, "For a Christian end to our lives, peaceful, without shame and suffering, and for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ, let us pray to the Lord."

No matter our age, the Church constantly reminds us to pray to God in preparation of our departure from this world. The themes of death and resurrection, of passage from darkness to light in Christ, are central to worship in the Orthodox Church. We can not help but reflect upon them. Death and resurrection are ever at the forefront of our minds.

This is not meant to promote morbid fascination, but rather to reinforce as St. Isaac of Syria once said: "This life has been given to you for repentance; do not waste it in vain pursuits."

We also read the lives of saints and the examples of how they died. Their lives and deaths provide us positive examples of how to live in this world, and how we are to leave it. Needless to say, Evangelicals do no such thing. They study neither accounts of martyrs nor the lives and deaths of the holy.

When our actual death draws near, the church has prescribed prayers for the terminally ill and those preparing for death. There are prayers to be said by the dying person, and to be said by those around him or her. I read these prayers beside my grandmother as the end came. It would have been so much better had she read them herself. The prayers in preparation for death help focus the mind of the dying person on the eternal things that matter. They help bring comfort and peace, and help the dying person let go of the cares of this world.

In Orthodoxy, as the end draws near, the priest will come to the dying person to pray the prayers for separation of the soul and the body. The Church, in the person of the priest, comes to stand with the dying person and to beseech God for His mercy. A ritual such as this provides both a finality and a continuity. The visit of the priest signals that the person's life is over, and that it is time to embrace the inevitable while calling for God's mercy. It also brings comfort, because the very timelessness of the ritual reinforces the continuity of the faith. This is how people are supposed to die, according to the standards of our community.

My grandmother didn't have anything like this support structure to help her. She was totally alone, bereft of any guidance or assistance. There was nothing in her life to provide them. Her church simply cast her alone into a hospital bed to die on her own. There were no prayers to focus on and to learn from. There was no moment of finality when the priest would come and pray over her, just as a priest would have prayed over her mother and her mother's mother and on back into the mists of time.

None of that was available. Instead, Granny had to make up her death on her own as she went along. Evangelicalism is the ultimate in do-your-own-thing.

And after Granny died, her family got to join in her isolation. We turned the body over to a funeral home, and then planned the visitation and funeral service with a funeral director. At the visitation, the only prayers offered were the Trisagion that I and my Orthodox wife offered up. No one else prayed. The pastor attended, but offered only words of condolence to the family.

The visitation was a purely secular affair. It could have been a room full of non-believers who had never heard of God.

The funeral was my mom's own creation. She decided on the music to be sung, the order of speakers, and the Bible verses to be used. Sitting there, watching everyone fumble around while trying to figure out what to do next, I felt overwhelmed by irony. While Evangelicals may speak often about traditional values, they have no actual traditions. This becomes evident at weddings and funerals, with equally tragic results. At times when all other cultures use traditions to emphasize continuity and unity, Evangelicalism emphasizes individuality and isolation.

Orthodox Ritual also preserves and teaches proper Theology. Without it, the results are horrible to behold. My Granny's funeral featured pop-style songs which contained a mixture of false notions about the after life with abject heresy. The preaching of the pastor failed to once mention the Resurrection. To hear him talk, one would leave the service believing that Granny had already arrived at her final destination, rather than awaiting the reunion of Soul and Body. (The word resurrection appears 10 times in the Orthodox funeral service.)

My Granny's body was totally ignored. It might as well not even have been present. Even at the graveyard, the pastor read a Bible verse, prayed a little prayer for the family, and then invited everyone to lunch. My wife and I stayed behind to pray the Trisagion, and then left the body sitting there waiting to be lowered outside the presence of the family.

Orthodox services, of course, bless and anoint the body. It seemed to me that the Evangelicals present were either afraid of the body of my grandmother, or were contemptuous of it. I couldn't quite decide which. Perhaps they were both.

As we drove away from the cemetery, on our way to have fried chicken at the social hall of the church, I turned to my wife and said, "Thanks be to God that we're Orthodox."

Some say the Evangelical world today is in chaos. That is not true. Evangelicalism is chaos. Religion is supposed to form the foundation of society. It is supposed to teach us how to live and how to die. Orthodoxy does that. We know how we are supposed to pray, how to fast, how to repent, how to live, and how to die. Evangelicalism provides none of that guidance. To be Evangelical is to be alone in your own made-up little world.

As I survey the Evangelical wreckage around me, I can't help but believe that we are living in the twilight of this radical movement. If I weren't already Orthodox, the unsatisfying death and funeral of my own grandmother would surely have started me on a quest for more permenant things. I am far from alone in this. The younger generations in the United States, having imbided the cultural anarchy around us, are fleeing towards traditional communions in droves.

Despite the apparent size and strength of the Evangelical churches, I firmly believe that in a hundred years Evangelicalism will be a tiny fringe movement of misfits. The United States of my great-grandchildren will be dominated by Orthodoxy and a renewed Roman Catholicism. I expect all else to simply whither away and die.

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. You can contact him here .