Praying for Somebody Who Is Gone

He catches himself doing it in the car, which is where he has always prayed.

Nine months. He will be at the lights on the hill by the school and he will be halfway through it before he notices. Lord, look after my dad. Or sometimes just his father's name, twice, the way you say a name when there is nothing after it.

Then he stops. And there is a small, unpleasant few seconds where he does not know what he has just done.

Because he was raised carefully, and somewhere in that raising he absorbed the idea that this is not something a person does, that it belongs to a different tradition from his and that his own tradition has a settled view about it and the settled view is no. He could not tell you which sermon it came from. He is not even certain anybody ever said it out loud. It is simply there, in the same drawer as knowing not to whistle in church.

So he has a habit he cannot stop and a rule he cannot cite, and the two of them meet at the lights by the school about twice a week.

There is nobody he can ask. His brother would start something. His pastor is a good man and it would become a conversation about doctrine, and he does not want a doctrine, he wants to know what he is doing.

Sit in the car. Nobody here is going to hand you a rule or a promise.

What the impulse actually is

Start by separating two things that have been welded together in you.

There is the content of the request, and there is why your mouth is open at all. The rule you cannot cite is about the first one. The thing happening in the car is mostly the second.

For thirty odd years, whenever your father was on your mind and something in you moved toward him, it went out as a prayer. That was the route. The route did not shut when he died, and a habit of love that has run for three decades does not check the register before it moves. Your mouth is doing what your mouth has always done with the name of somebody you care about.

So take the impulse honestly rather than as an offense. You are not doing something disgraceful in that car, and nothing written anywhere makes an unbidden movement of love toward a dead parent a sin, and the Spirit who is described as helping our weakness in prayer is not standing at the lights taking notes.

That is not the same as saying the request lands where you might want it to. This page is not going to tell you either way, because Scripture does not, and a site that filled that silence would be handing you something it made up.

Where Scripture actually stops

Now the substance, and the honest thing here is to show you the edge and not step over it.

And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.Ecclesiastes 12:7

That is the whole architecture in one line, and notice what it does not describe. It gives a direction and a destination and no detail. Returns to God who gave it. There is no account of the arrival, no description of the state, and no instruction anywhere about what the living are or are not to do about it afterward.

There are traditions that have built in that silence, in both directions, and they have argued about it for a very long time. This page is not going to referee that and will not pretend the referee's chair is empty because it has an opinion in its pocket.

What can be said is what the verse says. Your father's spirit returned to the God who gave it. That is written down, the Spirit inspired it as a plain statement rather than as a comfort, and it puts him with Somebody rather than nowhere.

That is enough to stand on at the lights by the school. It is not everything and it was never going to be.

And you are entitled to the whole of that verse rather than the half of it you have been living on. Ecclesiastes 12:7 is not a bleak line about dust; the dust is the first clause and the second clause is where it goes, and the Spirit put both halves in one sentence so that nobody could take the first one on its own.

There is a discipline in that stopping point that is worth respecting rather than resenting. Everything Scripture declines to describe about the state of the dead, it declines consistently, across both testaments, in books written centuries apart by people with every reason to speculate. That is not an oversight. A God who wanted us building detailed pictures would have supplied the material, and the silence is doing something for you: it means nothing anybody tells you at a wake can outrank what you already have.

Turn the sentence toward the One listening

Here is the practical part, and it is a small adjustment rather than a correction.

You do not have to stop. You do have somewhere better to put it, and it costs you nothing to move.

When it comes, and it will come, let it change direction halfway. Nothing written anywhere forbids that turn, and the Spirit is the one who helps a man pray when he does not know what to say. Say his name, and then say something about God rather than something about your father. Lord, You are merciful. Lord, You know him and I do not. Lord, You have never mishandled anybody.

That is not a technicality to get you around a rule. It is the difference between a request you cannot verify and a statement you can lean on, and the second one is what actually settles a man at the lights.

You are allowed to speak to God about your father for the rest of your life. Nothing written anywhere forbids a son to bring his father's name into the presence of God, and the Spirit is not fastidious about the grammar of a man who misses somebody.

And notice what happens to the few seconds afterward when you do it that way. There is nothing to feel caught out by, because you have said something true.