Looking Death Daily in the Eye

Today, we are invited into a key moment in Jesus’ life, the moment when he faces his imminent death and comes to terms with it.  The scene will be echoed again and again this week, as we hear stories of others who come face to face with death.  We will hear of Susanna, of the woman caught in adultery, of the Israelites threatened by deadly serpents, of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, and finally of Jeremiah listening as his enemies plot to take his life.  With each passing day, Jesus moves closer to his Passion.  Now “the hour has come” and Jesus is “troubled’ (Jn 12:28).   This single word suggests a parallel to the anguished prayer of Gethsemane, described at length in the Synoptic Gospels.  Another parallel is found in the Letter to the Hebrews: “he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Heb 5:7).  These latter accounts emphasize the anguish of Jesus in the face of death, while taking its resolution somewhat for granted.  John’s account, on the other hand, encapsulates all the mental and emotional struggle into a single word, “trouble,” but gives deeper insight into how Jesus understood and accepted his death.

In a year that has counted the untimely deaths of more than two-and-a-half million of our brothers and sisters from the coronavirus, and no-one knows how many more from related deprivations, facing death is something humanity has been called to in an acute way.  Whether we have come to terms with it is another question.  No doubt many on the front lines of healthcare and of personal or family tragedy have entered the sacred place of Jesus’ anguish, forced to face questions of meaning that ordinary life places on the margins.  But what of those of us who have not been called to such a direct confrontation, who read about it in the papers.  What of those of us called to live by St Benedict’s words: “Look death daily in the eye (RB 4:47)?”  These words are a call to live on the margins, existentially speaking, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters.  This is the grace of the moment, which I would like to explore a little today.

Three verses from today’s gospel give us an insight into the spiritual content of facing death and coming to terms with it:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, 
it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (Jn 12:24)
The first thing is to see oneself, one’s life as a grain, holding within itself the possibility of fruit.  The grain is tiny, dry, and very poor.  It does not see the fruit; this is of the essence.  But if one believes and entrusts oneself to the power of the Giver of life, one may learn to let go, to allow oneself to fall, to submit to being broken open, so that this abundant life may be released.

“Father, glorify your name.”
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” (Jn 12:28)
The one who falls, falls into the hands of God.  This, too, is of the essence.  The relationship with the Father is indestructible, even though it will pass through the dark valley of incomprehension.  A life that is given, not just taken away, will be raised up by the One in whose eyes every death is precious.  To be raised up as a fragrant offering is to be glorified.

“Whoever serves me must follow me, 
and where I am, there also will my servant be.” (Jn 12:26)
These verses open a door and invite us in.  Will we enter this door?  We who are baptized have been baptized into his death.  We walk with him on the road to Jerusalem and beyond.  Jesus offers us the grace of participation in his moment of surrender.  Everything is for our sake.

In this we look to the martyrs to guide us, those followers of Christ par excellence.  I think of those recent martyrs who mean so much to us, especially at that moment of their lives when they faced their death and came to terms with it, resulting in the choice to go forward toward the “hour.”

Stanley Rother, the missionary priest from Oklahoma, gave his life to the people of a mountain village in Guatemala.  Having received death threats, he went back to Oklahoma and spent a critical time deciding whether to return.  He explained his decision in a letter to his home parish: “This is one of the reasons I have for staying in the face of physical harm.  The shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger.”

Jerzy Popielyszko, the polish priest who stood with the solidarity movement against the dehumanizing effects of Communism in his country, also gave his life for his people.  A crucial meeting with his Bishop offered him the possibility of taking a sabbatical in Rome, but he made the choice to stay.

Finally, our own brothers of Atlas chose to remain in Algeria under the explicit threat of death for love of the Algerian people.  For two and a half years, between the first time their monastery was invaded and their eventual abduction and murder, they lived the moment of Christ’s anguish and decision most intensely.  Christophe compares it to the time during Mass when the Holy Spirit is called down upon the gifts before they are consecrated:
“We are in a state of epiclesis….  We have been uprooted and led to a place where we could never have gone despite all our religious training.” (Christophe Lebreton, OCSO)
Christian speaks of the progressive integration of the possibility of death into daily monastic life:
“Slowly, each one is learning to integrate death into this gift of self and, with death, all the other conditions of this ministry of living together, which is necessary for total selflessness.  On certain days, all this appears hardly reasonable: as unreasonable as becoming a monk.” (Christian de Cherge, OCSO)

In each case the martyrs are drawn into the time of reckoning with death, and there they are given entry into Christ’s own heart: his total trust in the Father, his overwhelming love for those the Father has entrusted to him, and his confidence that life, not death, will flow from this offering.  This sounds like a commentary on what it means to live St Benedict’s words: “Look death daily in the eye” (RB 4:47).
Dom Bernardo Oliveira comments:
“To be coheirs with this Church of martyrs we have to be completely open to monastic martyrdom, totally committed to a long life full of little pin-pricks, shedding our blood in the patient passion of daily living.” (Bernardo Oliveira, OCSO)
I think this idea of monastic martyrdom needs to be taken with a pinch of salt in order not to lead us in a wrong direction.  Monasticism has presented itself across the centuries as a form of bloodless or “white” martyrdom, in the sense of a radical living-out of the gospel call to take up one’s cross and follow Christ.  But there is always the possibility of misunderstanding.  At times, ascesis as “mortification” has been presented as a responsibility to impose martyrdom on oneself, by the deliberate choice of penances and the inflicting of physical pain.  To aim to live as if dead, or in the process of dying a painful death by one’s own hand, surely represents a twisting of the grace of martyrdom beyond recognition.  In our day, we may err more readily on the other side, inflating the value of our sacrifices, overdramatizing our pinpricks and canonizing ourselves prematurely.  Remember Flannery O’Connor’s account in one of her short stories of a child’s fantasy of martyrdom: “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick” (Flannery O’Connor, A Temple of the Holy Ghost).

Olivier Clement makes the helpful clarification that mindfulness of death in the monastic tradition is not an intellectual exercise, or an act of the imagination.  We may think of the abbot who keeps a skull on his desk, or the monk who digs a spade of dirt out of his grave every day.  Rather it is an existential event, a feeling of finiteness, alienation, horror and precariousness before the fragility of life, in my own person and in the lives of all people, whom we seek to carry in our hearts.  Thus, daily to look death in the eye means to allow ourselves to be moved by the fragility of life.  The fear and anguish we experience draw us into Jesus’ moment of reckoning.  Memento mori moves seamlessly into memoria dei. 
“The mindfulness of death should be linked with the Name of Jesus, the name of death’s conqueror.  Then I know at once what I am saved from and by whom.” (Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism)
  
With these caveats in mind, there is no reason to deny that the lives of the martyrs, and the experience of so many in our times, touch us deeply and move us to honor their memory with our own self-gift.  We, too, want to be drawn into Jesus’ “hour,” into that “state of epiclesis,” and to integrate death into “the ministry of living together.”  As we grow older and hopefully wiser, we begin to realize that the desire for heroism is not virtue.  What matters is the desire for Christ, to live for him, expending our energy in service to his kingdom, sharing in his love for all those the Father has given him, and loving them until the end.  As followers of Christ, we are baptized into his death.  This means we are saved from the power of death, but not from dying, whether at the end of our mortal lives or in our daily encounters with the fragility of life.  Coming to terms with death in this sense frees us to live life to the full.  This is the witness to Christ we have to offer one another and the whole world.