The Panikhida

The Panikhida is the memorial service of the Orthodox Church, offered for a Christian who has fallen asleep in the Lord. It is a brief service, usually about half an hour, and it may be served in church, at a funeral home, at the graveside, or in the home of the departed. The Church does not leave her children at death; she goes on praying for them by name, and this service is the form that prayer takes.

A Panikhida is customarily served on the third, ninth, and fortieth days after death, on the anniversary of death, and on the Soul Saturdays appointed through the year, when the whole parish prays together for all its departed. It is also served on the eve of a funeral.

The form is ancient. The Apostolic Constitutions, a church order compiled about the year 380, already direct that the departed be remembered on the third, ninth, and fortieth days with psalms and prayers. The service itself is a condensed form of the funeral Matins, and it closes as memorials have closed for centuries, with the singing of Memory Eternal.

The hymns of the service do not pretend that grief is not real. They set grief inside the Resurrection. The same service that says all we mortals return to the earth answers itself at once with the song the Church sings beside every grave: Alleluia.

The priest begins, "Blessed is our God," and the people take up the prayers that open nearly every Orthodox service: the Trisagion, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal," and the Lord's Prayer. Grief is not given a special language. It is placed inside the Church's ordinary prayer, and the words Holy Immortal confess the deathless God before the fact of death.

The reader takes up Psalm 90: "He that dwelleth in the help of the Most High." Its images are all shelter: wings, a shield, angels given charge, deliverance from the terror by night. The Church reads it over her departed to entrust them to the protection that continues where ours has ended, and the psalm closes in God's own voice: "I will show him My salvation."

The litany that opens the Divine Liturgy opens here as well: "In peace, let us pray to the Lord." But every petition after the first is for the departed: for their repose, for the pardon of every transgression, voluntary and involuntary, for "a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of rest." The daily needs of the living give way, for this hour, to the need of one soul.

Where Matins would sing the festal "God is the Lord," the memorial service sings Alleluia, with verses: "Blessed are they whom Thou hast chosen and taken, O Lord." The same substitution marks the weekdays of Great Lent. Both point away from present festivity toward the age to come, and the Church's first sung word over death is praise.

The choir sings, "Thou only Creator Who, with wisdom profound, mercifully orderest all things." The hymn echoes St. Paul: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God" (Romans 11:33). Nothing, not even this death, falls outside God's loving ordering of the world, and the plea for rest stands not on the merits of the departed but on their hope in the One who fashioned them.

Between refrains of Psalm 118, "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes," the choir sings the hymns of the departed: "The choir of the saints have found the fountain of life," and "I am the image of Thine ineffable glory, though I bear the brands of transgressions." Sunday Matins sings a twin set of these hymns for the Resurrection. The funeral set is their mirror, asking that Pascha reach this soul.

"Again and again, in peace let us pray to the Lord." The little litany returns throughout the service, after the Evlogitaria and between the odes of the canon, always with the same two petitions: forgiveness of every transgression, and a place where the righteous repose. The service does not move past intercession; it keeps returning to it.

This short hymn is a sedalen, literally a "sitting hymn," sung at the point in Matins where the faithful were permitted to sit after long psalmody. It prays that God settle His servants in His courts, "according as it is written," and the written word it reaches for is the Alleluia's own psalm: "Blessed is he whom Thou hast chosen and taken; he shall dwell in Thy courts."

David's psalm of repentance, "Have mercy on me, O God," is the most often prayed psalm in Orthodox worship, and it stands here before the canon. Before the Church dares her longest intercession for the departed, she confesses that mercy, not merit, is the ground on which anyone, living or dead, stands before God.

A canon is a chain of sung poetry built on the great songs of Scripture, and the irmos that opens each ode ties it to its biblical song. The Panikhida takes the canon for the departed in a shortened form, the composition of St. Theophanes the Branded, with one refrain returning throughout: "Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of Thy servants."

"With the saints give rest, O Christ, where sickness and sorrow are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting." These lines are the surviving head of an ancient kontakion, a sung sermon, and they are heard at every Orthodox funeral and memorial. The Ikos answers with Genesis itself, "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return," and then turns even that sentence into a song: Alleluia.

Near the end, the service returns to its own beginning: "Holy God," the prayers to the Trinity, the Lord's Prayer. Everything that follows, from these prayers to Memory Eternal, is also served by itself at the graveside, where it is called simply the Trisagion. The longest memorial and the shortest end the same way.

Four brief hymns ask one thing from four sides: "With the souls of the righteous departed, give rest, O Savior, to the soul of Thy servant." They pass from the single soul to the company of the saints, to Christ who descended into hades and loosed the chains of the captives, and last to the Mother of God, asked to intercede. The whole service is in them in miniature.

The priest asks rest for the departed by name, and prays the prayer the whole service has been circling: "O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who hast trampled down death." The address is Moses' own (Numbers 16:22), and the exclamation is Christ's word at the tomb of Lazarus: "For Thou art the Resurrection, and the Life."

Even at a memorial the dismissal begins, "May Christ our true God, Who rose from the dead." The Church will not speak of death without first naming the Resurrection. The departed are commemorated by name, and the prayer asks that their souls be established in the mansions of the righteous.

The choir sings Memory Eternal three times, slowly, while the priest censes. The petition is not that we remember, though we will. It asks that God remember, for in Scripture it is God's remembering that keeps a man alive. It is the counterpart of the Many Years sung for the living.