The contract between the living and the
dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness. The dead
depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their
concerns, and keep them going in their secular afterlives. In return,
they (the dead) help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives,
organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses.
They provide us with the counsel needed to maintain the institutional
order, of which they remain the authors, and prevent it from
generating into a bestial barbarism.
The dead are our guardians. We give
them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on
so that they may help us go forward.
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