Prayer for the Departed

The Church prays for her dead, and has from the beginning: the departed are commemorated at every Liturgy, particles are lifted for them at the Proskomedia, and the memorial services, the Panikhida and the Trisagion for the dead, are served on the third, ninth and fortieth days and at the year's turning. Boiled wheat, kollyva, is blessed and eaten, because the grain must fall into the ground and die. Orthodoxy affirms that these prayers help the departed and does not explain how: it declines to describe a mechanism, a place of purgation, or a tariff of satisfaction, and holds that the state of the departed is not finally fixed until the Last Judgment.