At 1:52 AM on October 31,1999, a Boeing 767, EgyptAir Flight 990, plunged at almost Mach One into the ocean 60 miles south of Nantucket. Among the 217 persons on board were two friends with whom we had dined only four nights before.
Our friendship with this couple had begun through mutual interest and significant involvement in providing financial and volunteer support to St. Martin’s Ministries on the Delmarva Peninsula. St. Martin’s is a social service agency that distributes food and clothing to persons in need and also provides transitional housing and support services to at-risk mothers and their children. Over 20 years ago, Roman Catholic Benedictine nuns, who remain active at the core of the enterprise, originally founded St. Martin’s.
A major topic of conversation at our dinner together was the excited sharing of our friend’s plans for their long awaited, up-coming trip to Egypt. On October 31, the clock radio news awakened us, as it does each morning. Halfway through the news broadcast we realized that the plane crash being described was the aircraft our friends were riding. They were dead.
Between the living and the dead is a great gulf, a mystery to all. In the sixth and seventh centuries AD popular devotional practices nourished the religious imagination and yearning to “look away from this world so as to peer into the world of the dead.” [Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom] A widespread reverence developed for the dead whose lives had been deeply shaped by sanctity. These saints, whose presence was often sensed by the people, were prayed to, and given reverential attention, in the firm belief the saints were hard at work imploring God to care for the day-to-day concerns of the living. Millions of Christians became certain that the saints in heaven were continually engaged in assisting the living on earth.
By the seventh century the prayers of the people also became focused upon the fate of the departed and the necessity for the remission of sins. Front and center for Christians was “the dread occasion when, at the moment of death, the individual soul confronted the massed ranks of angels, saints, and greedy demons who guarded the thresholds of Heaven and Hell.” The living assumed the duty of praying for the individual souls of the departed so that each soul’s sins might be forgiven and the fate of hell avoided. The most important drama of prayer, the Lord’s Supper or Mass, became the popular and necessary means of caring for the soul of the departed.
The two-way flow of prayer and care across the gulf between the living and the dead continued from 700 until the Protestant Reformation, when it came under attack from the reformers. Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first two Anglican Prayer Books, made certain, in the final 1552 Book to remove any language in the burial rites that might be interpreted as prayers to the soul of the recently departed. As Episcopalian inheritors of Cranmer’s traditions, my wife Win and I were continually surprised in the months following the death of our friends to hear the Benedictine nuns associated with St. Martin’s expressing their gratitude for the intercession of our departed friends. Over the seven plus years since the plane crash, every step forward by the Ministries elicits comments from the Sisters remarking upon the devoted attention of these two souls in heaven so obviously praying for the well being of our work.
I talk often with Win about the impact of this whole experience – the tragic crash of Flight 990, the sudden loss of treasured friends, the way in which we continue to feel their presence with us in the work we do for St. Martin’s, the genuine warmth of the Sisters in their never failing gratitude to the departed for their care and attention. I have come to realize that we are experiencing what millions of Christians for centuries routinely accepted as the work of the saints in heaven.
I understand why the reformers had such a difficult time attempting to remove this grass root piety from the people. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his masterful history of the Reformation, makes the comment that Protestantism created “a division between the dead and the living much more radical and impermeable than Catholicism.” I have now experienced the reality of this judgment. Without expecting it to happen, Win and I have both been supported and encouraged by these many reminders of two well loved souls in heaven. In some mysterious manner, we have received the gift of a thinning of the division between the living and the dead, making that division seem, for a time, more permeable and less radical.
Please e-mail On Faith if you'd like to receive an email notification when On Faith sends out a new question.
Email Me | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
