He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken.
Encouraging Words...
Part of my journey to Eastern Orthodoxy has included the unloading of beliefs that I had been taught throughout my Christian life. One of these was the teaching that icons and saints were idols and that people prayed to them and worshiped them. That is not how it works in the Orthodox church. We embrace this passage and believe that those saints who have departed this earth, those who have lived their lives in Christ, are not gone but resting in the presence of Christ. They can hear our petitions and see what is going on in our lives...it is a mystery. We venerate them to show our respect for them and the lives that they have lived. We petition them and ask them to represent us to Christ since they are in His presence. Only God can answer our prayers. Only God deserves our worship. The icons that we have amongst us provide us with windows into the lives of these saints and the Church that, through the mysteries of our God and His ability to transcend time, we too can be drawn through these windows and partake in these events. It is indeed a mystery and one that the early church fathers deliberated and professed to be right and true.
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