The Death of a Monk

One of our monks died this morning, and his death put an end to his suffering. Old age was not kind to him at all, and he suffered from a variety of ailments in addition to being legally blind and seriously hard of hearing. I remember one day in particular when I was standing by a staircase and I heard a frantic cry for help. I had to search to find out where it was coming from because there were many echoes. I finally found him down on a landing between floors. He was shaking like a leaf and it was hard to get through his nervousness to calm him down so I could lead him back upstairs. I have no idea how he had managed to get himself down there. What a frightening thing he had to endure.

When I heard of his death, a thought immediately came to mind: “Now he can see again!!!!!”

In the days to come we will be offering the usual rounds of monastic prayers for him. I particularly like the “Office of the Dead” which we will pray when his body is brought to the monastery. It’s not a morbid thing at all. The emphasis is on passing through death to life, and the psalms are filled with hints and images of resurrection: “I am sure I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.” Things like that.

Some monks will get very nervous, especially those who are responsible for preparing the liturgies and the funeral. There are so many details to take care of, but I suspect you know exactly what that’s like if you’ve suffered the death of a loved one.

This is also a time for greater silence, and tremendous respect for one another. We never can know for sure how each of us is processing our brother’s death, and so we tend to be particularly careful of one another. It is possible that one or two of us will get very angry, since that is a natural part of the grieving process, and we are reminded by Saint Benedict that we should “try to be the first to show respect to the other, supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior . . . “ (Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 72 verses 4-5.)

There’s one thing I already noticed when we were praying noon prayer a little while ago. When we are praying the office (morning and evening prayer, night prayer and noon prayer), the words of the psalms tend to jump off the page and right into our hearts. This becomes a special contemplative time.

Monastic funerals are beautiful things, and whenever we go through one I can’t help reminding myself that one day will be my turn, and my brothers will do the same wonderful things for me that we are doing for our deceased confrère now.

Have I told you that I love my monastic life?

God bless you, and may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.

Feeling far from God?

I continue with Psalm 51, vv 12-13.

Cast me not away from your presence.

A friend once gave me a bumper sticker that said “Do you feel far from God? Well, who moved?” Since I don’t have a car of my own, I stuck it to the wall of my office. Not many benefitted from reading it, though, because it was in Hungarian. But some students used to ask me about it, and that ushered in nice teaching moment.

In the Psalm, David prays, Cast me not away from your presence,  and I’ve been thinking about that. God is in all things, and God’s love is within all of us, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” If that is the case, then could it really be possible that God would cast me out of his sight? If he were to do that, we would immediately turn to dust.

Rather, I would like to suggest that we cast Him from our presence. and by this I mean that we push him out of our consciousness and fail to consider that He is always with us, watching us and guiding us, and that when we move away He suffers just as Jesus suffered when the apostles fled when he was arrested.

But there are some times in our lives when we wish He would look somewhere else and not at us, especially when we are about to give into a temptation.

This is an important notion. So important, in fact, that Saint Benedict makes it the first step on the ladder of humility:

The first step of humility, then, is that a man keeps the fear of God always before his eyes (Psalm 36:2) and never forgets it. . . . . let him recall that he is always seen by God in heaven, that his actions everywhere are in God’s sight and are reported by angels at every hour. (Rule of St.Benedict, chapter 7, verses 1o and 12)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

(And I thank the Lord for giving me this inspiration today, because I was pressed for time and only had half an hour to come up with something. I really felt like I was taking dictation rather than writing something on my own. But creativity is often like that at times, and this was one of them.)

God bless you.