Above, an illustration of Alyosha and the children at the funeral in the ending of The Brothers Karamazov.

In a memorable scene from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha while mourning the passing of his Elder weeps and waters the earth with his tears, and then is described as rising up as if touched by someone (presumably his holy spiritual father) strengthened for future work.

Sinner that I am, I could not claim as deep an experience recently at the graves of my family in Chicago, but it was a moving and healing one nonetheless.

Having moved out of state, I had not visited their graves since their deaths decades ago, touched by tragedy, and repenting of sin on my part in my early family life then, in what seemed another life.

Yet on this most recent trip I brought along my priest’s satchel thinking that I might visit their graves again at last, now as an unworthy priest, to say graveside prayers there.

They were not Orthodox, so my prayers were the basic Trisagion invocations, and blessing their graves with holy water.

The cemetery is in the middle of a modern booming suburban area, and in fact could be seen from the high-rise hotel room where my older son and I were staying while visiting a living relative with health needs.

One morning on our short stay I got up early to go to the cemetery, and was grateful when my son expressed that he wanted to go with me. He had never known my parents and sister (or my grandparents) who were all buried there. Yet he helped me find the graves, and prayed with me.

All these years later, the prayers were still a release, a refreshment, an opportunity for penitential reflections on my failings as a family member, on my sinful life before becoming an Orthodox Christian almost three decades ago now (near the end of my parents’ lives and after my sister’s earlier passing), and my continued failings and sins since.

It marked a link also to memories of my final moments with each of my parents, when I was able to pray the Jesus Prayer with them as a newly baptized Orthodox Christian.

How wonderful are the prayers of our Church and is our God, that we can reach out in prayer to the past, redeem memories good and bad, and share that experience with our family members, both in our household and in our family that is the Church, and, we hope, with those of who have passed on not in the Church.

The prayers and the reaching across generations with my son present were a reminder, also, of a statement by Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s novel, that one good memory from childhood can be enough to save us, for (in my own terms) it can help to lead us to faith by the grace of our Lord.

Glory to God for all things!