To those who ask for example why do Africans maintain a particular relationship with the dead, we will say, like the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) that: “In Africa, there is no boundary between the visible and the invisible, between life and death. Reality only acquires its depth and becomes truth by expanding to the extensible dimensions of the surreal”[2]. In other words, as Birago Diop (1906-1989) said in his poem souffles, “those who died never left. They are in the lightening shadows and in the deepening shadows; they are not under the earth, but in the tree that quivers, the wood that groans, the water that flows, the water that sleeps; they are in the hut, and also in the crowd[2]”; in short, “the dead are not dead[2]”. And for those who believe in it, we need to pay attention to how we behave in our living environment because the respect that we show towards everything that is around us is already a prayer.
Respecting our environment is a prayer; planting trees is a prayer; campaigning for the preservation of forest and marine ecosystems is a prayer. Everything that Men does to be in harmony with himself and the environment in which he lives is a prayer because if the other is not really dead but still remains among us in an invisible way and even visible through the other living animal and plant beings, the good acts that we perform on a daily basis are as satisfying for him as for us. “Time does not belong to us; it imposes itself on us. We cannot escape it and it inevitably leads to death, our death and that of those we love who give us the experience of mourning which opens us to other dimensions of time.[3]”Our actions, and we must specify the good ones, must be prayers which truly testify to the love we have for our environment and our cultures which arise from the universal love of God for all Mens. In this sense, the one who acts is a living person who does not act for dead people but for invisible living beings and other visible animal and plant living beings who reside in the same living environment as him and who also want our environment to be treated with great care because it is in fact a common house as the Holy Father Francis said in his encyclical letter Laudato si'[4] of May 24, 2015 relating to the safeguarding of the common house.
It is this same idea of communion that is also found in Catholic Christianity. Even if many people know that Roman Catholics in particular pray for the dead, not everyone knows exactly what it is.
One of the elements of response to this concern is found in the first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians in chapter 12, and verses 12 to 14: “Christ is like a single body, which has many parts; it is still one body, even though it is made up of different parts. In the same way, all of us, Whether Jews or Gentiles, whether slaves or free, have been baptized into the one body by the same spirit, and we have all been given the one spirit to dink. For the body itself is not made up of only one part, but of many parts.[5]” In other words, whatever you were before or the condition in which you found yourself, when you accept Christ as Lord and Saviour after listening to the word of God or after a period of pre-baptismal accompaniment or catechumenate, you enter the great family of the children of God through Christ, who are all called through all what they do to work towards the extension of His reign of love on earth. And since this work or mission of redemption of God in the present world, no member or better yet, no Christian family can exercise it alone, there are other families which also have their particularities which results from the particular relationship that they have with Christ.
This is the reason why, if some baptize the dead through Christian members of their Christian families, others will not do it because the relationship they have with God forbids them because according to them, it is necessary give your life to Jesus during your lifetime. For still others and for the Catholic Church in particular, one must adhere to the faith of the Church during one's lifetime to benefit from all the means of sanctification. What is it about?
It is about accepting Christ into your life after listening to the word of God and being baptized to enter the great family of the children of God. The only difference is that you have become a Christian of the Roman Catholic Church which itself is subdivided into three complementary groups or better, three states link to its faith in a single God namely: The present Church or in pilgrimage on earth, the Church suffering or in a state of atonement, and the celestial Church. Concretely this means this: if you become a Catholic Christian, you have passed from death to life with Christ through baptism. And since the Apostle Saint Paul says in verses 38 and 39 of the 8th chapter of his epistle to the Romans that: “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created things, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”[6], we are no longer dead people but alive people, members of the Roman Catholic Christian family. So as the name indicates, if the earthly pilgrimage ends, for the spiritual body, it is either the state of expiation of the suffering Church which is already the certainty of eternal life with this precision that it is a transitional phase of limited duration, or else the celestial Church directly. However, it is important to clarify two things: First, “each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven through a purification or immediately an everlasting damnation[7]" (CCC 1022) Secondly, like all other Christian families on the basis of what the Gospel according to Saint John tells us from verses 28 to 29 of its 5th chapter: “Do not be surprised at this; The time is coming when all the death will hear his voice and come out of their graves: those who have done good will rise and live, and those who have done evil will rise and be condemned.[5]"
