Word about the benefit of remembering the dead
A certain man from Cyprus was bought as a slave and taken to Persia where they put him in prison. Some men escaping from that place came to Cyprus and his parents asked them if they had seen him. And they told them that he had died. They even told them the day and month when he had died. `We had buried him with our hands` they said. But it was not that one they asked about, it was another one who looked like him.
So his parents made for him three diptyches per year at the holy liturgies as it is the custom. After four years that man who was in prison fled from Persia and returned to Cyprus. His parents told him: `We heard that you died and we made diptyches for you three times a year. And when he heard them saying this he asked them when they had done these. And they answered: `On Nativity, on Easter and on Pentecost.` Then he told them: `On these three days of the year someone dressed in white clothes like the sun came to me and freed me from my chains and from my prison and I was walking all day long and nobody recognized me. Then the next day I found myself again in chains.
(Prologues, volume1, Bunavestire Publishing, p. 232)
