There are ministries that announce themselves.
They have buildings.
Signs.
Websites.
Programs.
Committees.
Schedules.
People know where they meet and what they do.
And then there are ministries that begin quietly.
Sometimes they begin beside a hospital bed.
Sometimes in a funeral home.
Sometimes in a cemetery where the grass has grown too high around an old stone.
Sometimes in the silence after everyone else has gone home.
And sometimes they begin with a simple realization:
Someone has to remember them.
That thought has been following me for a long time.
I have spent years trying to understand what my priesthood was supposed to become. I imagined ministries, communities, places of worship, outreach, projects, and all the things a newly ordained priest can imagine when he believes he is supposed to go out and change the world.
I wanted to build.
I wanted to gather.
I wanted to help everyone.
I wanted to find the place where I could finally say, This is it. This is what God called me to do.
And perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction.
Perhaps I was looking for a crowd when I was being taught to notice the one.
Perhaps I was looking for a congregation when I was being taught to stand beside a grave.
Perhaps I was trying to save the living while God was slowly teaching me how to accompany them toward death—and how to remember those who had already crossed the threshold.
This is not a ministry of death in the way the world sometimes imagines it.
It is a ministry of reverence.
A ministry of presence.
A ministry of remembrance.
A ministry of mercy.
And perhaps most importantly, a ministry of love when there is nothing left to fix.
The Church Must Not Look Away
We live in a culture that is remarkably uncomfortable with death.
We hide it.
We sanitize it.
We outsource it.
We hurry through it.
We often remove the dying from the center of our lives and place them somewhere else, somewhere where professionals can manage the things we no longer want to see.
The dying person goes into a hospital.
The body goes to the funeral home.
The dead go into the cemetery.
The grieving family eventually returns to work.
And society continues moving.
But Christianity should be different.
The Christian faith begins with a body.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
— John 1:14, ESV
The center of Christianity is not an abstraction.
It is not merely an idea.
It is not simply the immortality of a disembodied soul.
The Word became flesh.
Christ entered human existence bodily.
He was born.
He was held.
He ate.
He drank.
He became tired.
He wept.
He suffered.
He bled.
He died.
He was buried.
And Christian faith proclaims that death did not have the final word.
That changes the way we should look at death.
The Christian does not need to pretend that death is beautiful.
Death can be horrifying.
It can be violent.
It can be premature.
It can be lonely.
It can tear families apart.
It can leave a room feeling as though something enormous has been removed from the universe.
But death is not something the Christian needs to look away from.
Christ entered it.
And because Christ entered it, we can enter the room too.
The Ministry of Staying
There is a particular kind of ministry that begins when there is nothing left to say.
The doctor has said everything that can be said.
The family has cried.
The machines have been silenced.
The visitors have gone.
The room becomes still.
And someone remains.
That someone may not have answers.
They may not be able to explain suffering.
They may not understand why this particular person had to die.
They may not know what lies beyond the veil.
But they can remain.
Sometimes remaining is the ministry.
There is tremendous spiritual discipline in simply staying.
We live in a world obsessed with solutions.
We want to fix grief.
Fix loneliness.
Fix suffering.
Fix death.
But there are things a priest cannot fix.
There are things no priest can explain.
There are mysteries that should not be forced into convenient theological answers.
At the bedside of the dying, the priest may discover that the most important thing he can offer is not an explanation.
It is presence.
A hand held.
A prayer whispered.
Anointing.
Silence.
A blessing.
A familiar passage of Scripture.
The Lord’s Prayer.
A family member reassured that they do not have to be strong.
And sometimes simply:
I am here.
That may be enough.
The Mother Who Remains
This is where the Sorrowful Mother becomes particularly important to my understanding of this ministry.
Mary did not explain the Cross.
She did not stand beneath it with a theological treatise.
She did not tell everyone why this was happening.
She did not make suffering easier by pretending it was something it was not.
She remained.
She stood beneath the Cross.
She watched.
She suffered.
She received the body of her Son.
And she held Him.
That image has become increasingly important to me.
Because the ministry of the departed may require the same kind of presence.
Not explanation.
Presence.
Not answers.
Love.
Not certainty about every mystery.
Faithfulness.
Mary knew the weight of Christ’s body.
She knew what it meant to hold the One she had once carried within her womb after He had been taken down from the Cross.
She knew the terrible silence of Holy Saturday.
And perhaps that is one reason the Sorrowful Mother has become such an important figure in my own understanding of priesthood.
She teaches something that cannot easily be learned in a classroom:
how to remain when love hurts.
The Body Still Matters
I wrote previously about the Mother who knows the body.
That reflection belongs here too.
Because the ministry of the departed cannot become so spiritualized that we forget the body.
The dead person was not merely a soul.
They were a person.
A body.
A face.
A voice.
Hands.
Feet.
Eyes.
Scars.
Hair.
Teeth.
A heartbeat.
A history.
A lifetime of ordinary physical existence.
The body carried them through this world.
It held their laughter and their exhaustion.
It knew their work.
It knew their illness.
It knew their pleasures and their pain.
And eventually it became still.
That body deserves reverence.
This is one reason I find cemeteries so compelling.
A cemetery is not simply a place where bodies have been deposited.
At its best, it is a place of memory.
Names remain.
Dates remain.
Flowers appear.
People visit.
Someone tends the grass.
Someone clears the weeds.
Someone places a wreath.
Someone whispers a prayer.
Someone stands beside a stone and says:
“I remember you.”
There is something profoundly Christian about that.
Because God remembers.
“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”
— Psalm 116:15, ESV
The dead may disappear from the attention of the world.
They do not disappear from the love of God.
And perhaps part of the ministry of the departed is to become a human reminder of that truth.
Praying for Those Who Have Gone Before Us
The practice of praying for the departed is ancient within Christianity, though different Christian traditions understand that practice differently.
Within sacramental Christianity, prayer for the dead has long been understood as an act of love and communion: we entrust the departed to God’s mercy rather than pretending that our relationship with them simply ceased at death.
That distinction matters.
Prayer does not mean that we control God.
It does not mean that we possess secret knowledge about the condition of someone’s soul.
It does not mean that a priest can manipulate what lies beyond the veil.
It means that love continues to speak.
We say:
Lord, receive them.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, remember your servant.
Lord, grant them rest.
And perhaps, in praying for them, we are also changed.
Because praying for the departed forces us to confront our own mortality.
Eventually, someone will pray for me.
Eventually, someone will stand beside my body.
Eventually, my name will appear somewhere with two dates connected by a small horizontal line.
And everything I thought was so important will become remarkably small.
The arguments.
The ambitions.
The possessions.
The titles.
The grudges.
The desire to prove myself.
All of it will become quiet.
What remains?
Love.
Mercy.
The people I helped.
The people I wounded.
The prayers I offered.
The prayers offered for me.
And God.
The Forgotten Dead
There is another part of this ministry that troubles me deeply.
Not everyone has someone.
There are people who die surrounded by family.
And there are people who die alone.
There are people whose funerals fill churches.
And there are people whose deaths barely register anywhere.
There are graves visited every week.
And graves whose names are slowly disappearing.
There are people whose families remember the exact sound of their laugh.
And there are people whose photographs sit in boxes because no one remains who remembers them.
This is where I believe the ministry of the departed becomes something more than funeral ministry.
It becomes the ministry of remembrance.
To remember the forgotten.
To pray for those whose names no one speaks.
To care about those who died without the dignity of a large gathering.
To stand in a cemetery and recognize that every stone represents an entire human existence.
Every name once belonged to someone who woke up in the morning.
Someone had dreams.
Someone was frightened.
Someone fell in love.
Someone made mistakes.
Someone laughed at something ridiculous.
Someone worried about money.
Someone worked.
Someone got sick.
Someone sat beside another person and said, “I love you.”
Someone once believed they had plenty of time.
Then one day they didn’t.
That is not nothing.
That is a human life.
And human life deserves remembrance.
The Priest at the Veil
Perhaps this is why the image of the priest standing at the veil has become so persistent for me.
I do not mean that the priest possesses some supernatural access to what lies beyond death.
I mean something simpler.
The priest stands at the place where human beings encounter one of the greatest mysteries of existence.
Birth has its threshold.
Death has its threshold.
Grief has its threshold.
Conversion has its threshold.
Suffering has its threshold.
And the priest is sometimes called to stand there with people.
Not as someone who knows everything.
But as someone willing to stand in the mystery without running away.
The priest can say:
“You do not have to face this alone.”
He can pray.
He can listen.
He can bless.
He can remain silent.
He can help the family understand the rituals surrounding death.
He can help preserve dignity.
He can remind people that grief is not failure.
He can remind them that crying is not a lack of faith.
He can remind them that Jesus Himself wept.
“Jesus wept.”
— John 11:35, ESV
That may be one of the most important verses for this ministry.
Jesus wept.
Not because He lacked faith.
Not because He misunderstood resurrection.
He wept because someone He loved had died.
There is something liberating in that.
Christian hope does not eliminate grief.
It gives grief somewhere to go.
The Ministry Is Not About Having Answers
I have spent much of my life wanting answers.
Why did this happen?
Why did that person die?
Why did God allow this?
Why did the illness come?
Why did the accident happen?
Why did the relationship end?
Why did the person suffer?
Why did the person have to die alone?
And perhaps the ministry of the departed has taught me something uncomfortable:
I may never know.
And I may not be supposed to know.
There is a humility required here.
A priest must resist the temptation to turn mystery into certainty.
We can proclaim Christ.
We can proclaim resurrection.
We can proclaim mercy.
We can entrust the departed to God.
But we should be careful about pretending that we have been given a map of heaven.
Mystery remains mystery.
That does not make faith weaker.
Perhaps it makes faith more honest.
The ministry of the departed is not about pretending that we know what we cannot know.
It is about faithfully accompanying people into the questions.
From Dust to Dust
There is something extraordinarily beautiful about the Christian understanding of the body returning to the earth.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
— Genesis 3:19, ESV
We often hear those words as bleak.
But there is another way to hear them.
Dust is where we began.
Dust is where we return.
We are creatures.
We belong to creation.
The body is made of the same created world that surrounds us.
The minerals in our bones.
The water in our bodies.
The elements that make us possible.
The food we eat.
The air we breathe.
The sunlight that sustains the plants that sustain us.
We are not separate from creation.
We are part of it.
And when the body returns to the earth, the great cycle continues.
What was once living becomes nourishment for other life.
Soil receives.
Roots grow.
Plants rise.
Animals feed.
Seeds form.
The world continues.
There is humility here, but there is also wonder.
We are dust.
And God loves dust enough to become flesh.
That thought alone could occupy a lifetime of contemplation.
The Dead Teach the Living
Perhaps the strangest thing about working with the departed is that the dead begin teaching the living.
They teach us that we are temporary.
They teach us that time matters.
They teach us to say what needs to be said.
They teach us to forgive.
They teach us that possessions cannot follow us.
They teach us that the body is precious precisely because it is temporary.
They teach us that the person who died was more than the circumstances of their death.
They teach us that every ordinary day is extraordinary when viewed from the end.
And they teach us that love is not measured by how long someone remains physically present.
Sometimes someone dies and continues to shape a family for generations.
A grandmother’s prayer.
A father’s kindness.
A mother’s recipe.
A brother’s laugh.
A friend’s terrible jokes.
A teacher’s encouragement.
A priest’s blessing.
A stranger’s act of kindness.
These things continue.
The body dies.
The influence may not.
The memory may not.
The love may not.
And Christian hope says that even death cannot finally separate us from God.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life… will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
— Romans 8:38–39, ESV
That is the promise at the center of this ministry.
Not that I understand death.
Not that I can explain the afterlife.
Not that I can see behind the veil.
But that God’s love is larger than the grave.
A Ministry of Mercy
The more I think about this calling, the more I believe the word mercy belongs at its center.
Mercy for the dying.
Mercy for the dead.
Mercy for the grieving.
Mercy for families who are angry.
Mercy for people who have complicated relationships with the Church.
Mercy for those who never reconciled with someone before they died.
Mercy for the person who is terrified.
Mercy for the person who has no religious language left.
Mercy for the person who cannot pray.
Mercy for the priest who sometimes cannot pray either.
There are moments when the only prayer left is:
Jesus, have mercy.
And perhaps that is enough.
The Ministry I Was Not Expecting
I once thought ministry meant building something.
Now I am beginning to wonder whether some ministry is simply about being willing to stand where other people do not want to stand.
Beside the lonely.
Beside the dying.
Beside the grieving.
Beside the body.
Beside the grave.
Beside the person everyone else has forgotten.
Perhaps priesthood is not always about filling a church.
Sometimes it is about entering an empty room.
Perhaps it is not always about preaching to hundreds.
Sometimes it is whispering a prayer over one person.
Perhaps it is not always about building community.
Sometimes it is becoming the person who remembers someone who has no community left.
And perhaps that is not a lesser ministry.
Perhaps it is precisely the ministry Christ has been teaching me to see.
At the Grave
I have always loved cemeteries.
I used to think perhaps that was simply an oddity about me.
Now I think there may be something deeper in it.
A cemetery slows the world down.
The living walk among the dead and, for a moment, remember that they too are mortal.
There is no competition among the graves.
No one cares who had the largest house.
No one cares who had the most followers.
No one cares what political party they belonged to.
No one cares how important they thought they were.
The stones simply remain.
Names.
Dates.
And sometimes a few words attempting to summarize an entire existence.
At the grave, the world becomes quiet enough to tell the truth.
We are mortal.
We are loved.
We are temporary.
We are dependent upon one another.
And we belong to God.
Perhaps the cemetery is not merely a place where the dead rest.
Perhaps it is a classroom for the living.
What I Hope This Ministry Becomes
I do not know exactly what this ministry will look like.
That uncertainty used to frighten me.
Now I find it strangely peaceful.
Perhaps it will involve funerals.
Perhaps hospitals.
Perhaps hospice.
Perhaps funeral homes.
Perhaps cemeteries.
Perhaps visiting families after a death.
Perhaps prayers for the departed.
Perhaps helping people who have no one else to call.
Perhaps simply being available when someone says:
“Father, someone I love has died, and I don’t know what to do.”
Maybe that is enough.
I do not need to build the largest ministry.
I do not need thousands of people.
I do not need a spectacular platform.
I need to be faithful.
I need to learn.
I need to listen.
I need to know when to speak and when silence is more appropriate.
I need to understand the traditions surrounding death and burial.
I need to respect the dignity of the body.
I need to care for grieving people without trying to rush them through grief.
I need to remember that I am not the Savior.
Christ is.
That distinction may be one of the most important lessons of my entire dark night.
I cannot save everyone.
I cannot repair the world.
I cannot carry every wounded person.
I cannot answer every question.
But I can stand beside someone.
I can pray.
I can listen.
I can remember.
I can place the departed into God’s hands.
And I can say:
You are not forgotten.
Under the Mantle
Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the Sorrowful Mother.
She stands at the threshold.
She knows what it means to love someone whom death has touched.
She knows the unbearable weight of a body.
She knows the silence of Holy Saturday.
She knows what it means to wait when there is nothing left to do.
And perhaps that is why I imagine her not as someone explaining the mystery, but as someone teaching me how to remain inside it.
Under her mantle, I do not need to have every answer.
I can simply learn to stay.
Stay with the dying.
Stay with the grieving.
Stay with the forgotten.
Stay with the body.
Stay with the grave.
Stay with the questions.
Stay with Christ.
And perhaps, eventually, understand that the veil is not a wall I am required to tear down.
It is a mystery I am called to approach reverently.
There are things on this side of it that I am responsible for.
There are things beyond it that belong to God.
My ministry is here.
At the threshold.
With the living.
With the grieving.
With the departed.
With the Mother who knows sorrow.
And with Christ, who entered death and proclaimed that death would not have the final word.
The Last Prayer
Perhaps someday someone will stand beside my own body.
Perhaps someone will pray over me.
Perhaps someone will remember the things I did well and the things I did poorly.
Perhaps someone will forgive me for the things I never knew I had done.
Perhaps someone will place their hand upon my coffin.
Perhaps someone will say my name one last time.
And if that day comes, I hope the priest standing there remembers what I am learning now:
Do not be afraid of the body.
Do not rush the grief.
Do not manufacture answers.
Do not pretend to know the mysteries of God.
Stand there.
Pray.
Love.
Remember.
And entrust the person to Christ.
Because every life deserves that dignity.
Every body deserves that reverence.
Every grieving heart deserves that tenderness.
And every departed soul deserves to be placed, once again, into the hands of mercy.
So this is the ministry I am beginning to understand.
Not a ministry of death.
A ministry through death.
A ministry of presence.
A ministry of remembrance.
A ministry of the body.
A ministry of the grieving.
A ministry of the forgotten.
A ministry of mercy.
A ministry at the veil.
And perhaps, finally, a ministry in which I no longer have to try to save the world.
I only have to be faithful to the person standing in front of me.
The dying person.
The grieving person.
The forgotten person.
The departed person.
And when I have nothing left to give them except a prayer, perhaps I can give them that.
I can make the sign of the Cross.
I can speak the name of Jesus.
I can commend them to God’s mercy.
And I can remain.
Because sometimes the holiest thing a priest can do is not explain the mystery.
It is to stand beside it—
quietly,
reverently,
lovingly—
until the silence itself becomes a prayer.
And perhaps somewhere beyond that silence, Christ is already waiting.