The Old Words Are Helpful

Last updated on: July 14, 2025 at 12:35 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Old Words Are Helpful 2025-07-14T12:35:43-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Hope

Dad is gone.

I keep wanting to call him. I need his advice. He is there my reason tells me, but he is silent. Death has created, for the moment, a chronological loneliness that nothing can heal for now.

Death is horrible.

For those looking for something different, some profound new words about the loss of a great man, I have nothing. I have old words. My Dad spent a lifetime giving me old words in his life. He made old words, “amazing grace,” “the circle will be unbroken,” and “the I AM is” real and now when he cannot speak I am left with the old words he spoke in my own time. Those old words are very helpful, because very hopeful, actually.

So were the prayers an Orthodox priest prayed in the hour of his death, the Orthodox funeral service, and also the committal prayers. They were all helpful. In my class, very educated and aware, the fashionable thing is to say how they were not wholly helpful and they were not. If I hoped they would remove the sting of death, they were not helpful, but the service affirmed the pain and the ugliness of a beautiful body turned to decay. The service matched the reality and so was helpful, actually.

I could be hopeless, I suppose, but my unclouded reason, before the pain, told me that there was hope that the dead will live again. The best I could do, thinking as hard as I could, suggested that the triumph of Jesus Christ over death gave all humanity hope, back when my reason was less clouded. I understand, at the very gut level, the temptation of despair just now, but I cling to reason and to Jesus. Hope is, after all, better than hopelessness.

Despair is too shallow for the pain: allowing easy escapes. The Christian hope demands carrying on this side of death with the old words “we will meet, but we will miss him.” And yet the lure of enervating sorrow is there, but this is not even genuine sorrow. It is giving up on honoring the dead, fulfilling their legacy, doing what needs doing. Sorrow is real and must be faced, but the dungeon of despair is to fall into falsehood.

Being dead, they live.

As one naturally inclined, by biology and history, to depression I get the lure of despair. Death, even at the ripe age of eighty-seven is not tragic, but is still ugly. We will meet, mayhap, but we will miss him. The old words count. They are old and still repeated, not because they cover up reality, but because they are a balm to reality. When one is hurting, then a balm is good. Saying that the words are “just a balm” is true, but does not remove their soothing and healing properties at the moment, and I trust from testimony, over time.

Somehow the bad news is taken to be the truest truth and it is not. The good news is hardest to believe just now, but is true nonetheless. If there is some foolish faux-christianity where the faithful were told to deny their pain and pretend to cheer that death does not allow, then the reality of the severity of death destroys that false fantasy. Faith has nothing to do with illusion and happy talk is trivial and gross in the light of decay and death.

The old words of the Church do not pretend:

Weep, and with tears lament when with understanding I think on death, and see how in the graves there sleeps the beauty which once for us was fashioned in the image of God, but now is shapeless, ignoble, and bare of all the graces. O how strange a thing; what is this mystery which concerns us humans? Why were we given up to decay? And why to death united in wedlock? Truly, as it is written, these things come to pass by ordinance of God, Who to him, now gone gives rest.

But I belong to a church that has made me see the bones of the faithful in church and has not whispered that everyone I love shall die, but proclaimed it in hard words. Just as clearly, however, they have said “Christ is risen” and given me the rational hope of the resurrection of the dead. Those who are dead will live again, all to judgment, and some to joy eternal.

Of this I am confident: if anyone will go the Paradise of God, then Dad will be there. The old words are true:

The death which You have endured, O Lord, is become the harbinger of deathlessness; if You had not been laid in Your tomb, then would not the gates of Paradise have been opened; wherefore to him (her), now gone from us give rest, for You are the Friend of Mankind.

Both now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

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