Good morning, and I'd like to welcome you to this retreat entitled The Paschal Mystery,
Dying into the Fullness of Life.
And I'd like to begin with a prayer.
Spirit of the living God, we pray for your enlightenment.
We pray for your wisdom.
We pray for your strength and courage and fortitude.
We pray that we might know how to die in life and how to truly come alive in death.
We pray to know this mystery, the mystery of birth and death, for our life here on earth
and our life beyond physical death, our eternal life with you, the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit.
Amen.
By way of introduction, one could ask the question, why this topic?
And I suppose I was asking it of myself.
Why this topic on death?
And I have a number of reasons that came to me.
The first is a very personal reason, the increasing importance of clarifying in my life the basic
issue of birth and death.
Or another way of saying that is, why do all things come to be and then cease to be?
This became particularly acute for me when I started going through midlife in my late
thirties and into my early forties.
And this was precipitated by a number of events.
There was my own aging process and changes, physiological changes, which were signals
or reminders to me that I was past my youthful vigor and entering another stage of life.
But also other events like the death of my grandparents all took place, for the most
part, in my late thirties and early forties.
And they had always been very close and involved with our family living nearby.
So it was certainly an event that signaled the torch had been passed from them as the
seniors in the family to my parents.
But then around the same time, my own dad's health became increasingly fragile and his
own strength as he entered into retirement and became more and more inflicted by his
various ailments, that the torch or the flame of life or seniority was then being passed
on to his children and eventually his own death.
Another event that was an important signal for all of this, this theme of birth and death,
was my own decision to leave my religious community after 21 years and to make a radical
move to a new monastic community, namely here at the Hermitage.
That was an experience of death.
After 21 years to leave that community and of course coming here was an experience of
new birth, new life.
So all of those events certainly kept bringing to, in an intense way, to my consciousness
this theme of beginning and end, birth and death, as an endless, seemingly endless cycle,
and as having some kind of intimate connection or relationship to one another.
A second reason for this topic is the increasing realization of the tension that's created
between these seemingly opposite poles and that are fundamental polarities that are working
in life, on life, and with life around me, as well as in and on and with my own life in
particular.
And feeling this tension and noticing the, at least some level of my personality, trying
to resolve the tension one way or another, and then realizing the wisdom lay in staying
right in the middle of the two.
A third reason for this topic that became apparent for me was the importance of facing
death for greater liberation, greater freedom in my life to simply be, to simply live life.
I remember reading that Merton, towards the latter part of his life, someone asked him
what he wore and how he prayed and etc., and he kind of had reduced it all to how he prayed
was breathe, and what he wore were pants.
I think as we grow older, and especially after we pass through midlife, as Merton had done
in this instance of that comment, and faced his own death, or the reality of death, perhaps
more acutely in his life, discovered a liberation, a freedom, to just be, and to not be too attached
to roles and structures and the externals.
So this was becoming important for me.
A fourth reason for this topic is by virtue of the religion that I belong to, and that
we belong to, and central to the Christian religion, is the Paschal Mystery, central
to Christian life.
It is somehow at the heart of daily life, and so much so that we celebrate it at least
weekly and for some people daily in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and that that would coincide
with this season, this being just shortly after Easter, so we're in the Easter season.
That also seemed appropriate for this topic.
A fifth influence, or reason for this topic, is the influence of other religious traditions,
and their emphasis on facing death.
Their own wisdom has come to the conclusion that to grow in life, one must face the reality
and the mystery of death.
And this is true in Native American culture, and perhaps some ways more or less, or different
ways in the various Native American tribes, and my own experience in New Mexico with the
Navajo tribe and the Zuni Pueblo tribe and some of the tribes where I started doing more
extensive reading in Native American spirituality.
That also was an influence.
My readings and exposure to Hinduism, the story, rather captivating story, of this young
man who suddenly got this into his head that he was going to die, and this reality, he
was in his teens, was so overpowering that he couldn't escape it, and it was completely
engaging, and he finally just went and laid down and completely faced his own death and
actually felt something like a death experience take place in him, and went through a complete
change and became a yogi, a great teacher, who later very much influenced Harry Lussot,
who as you may know was the French Benedictine who was the second to go to southern India
to try to enter into a dialogue between Christian Benedictine monasticism and Hinduism, particularly
the monastic strain of Hinduism, followed upon by our own Father Bede Griffiths.
So that was an influence, as well as Buddhism.
My readings in Zen and exposure to Zen teaching, and particularly Dogen, I think is the way
it's pronounced, a great Zen teacher, some would ascribe as the founder of Soto Zen,
and his own stress on the importance of resolving or solving the mystery or the question of
birth and death.
And then last year I read the, in Tibetan Buddhism I had read the Book of the Dead,
and again was challenged by it to look more closely at the phenomenon of death and its
meaning in Christianity, its meaning for life, and again not only physical death but other
experiences that we call a death.
And finally some of my readings in Islam, particularly the Sufi mystics, and most
especially Rumi and some of his poetry.
So these have all been an influence.
And finally the last reason I would give would be the culture I live in.
I happen to live in American culture, North American culture, and it's a culture that
a number of acute observers have called a death-denying culture.
It may be a culture that where there's a lot of death, there's death by violence, by crime,
or death by the wars that we've been involved with as a country, and death in our movies
on the screen, but in terms of as a personal process that we are involved with, we are
a death-denying culture.
I think Ernest Becker in his best-selling book, The Denial of Death, is a classic now
and makes that point.
So all of these are reasons, I think, for us to look more closely at what is the meaning
of death, and particularly what light does Jesus Christ shed on this mystery for us.
So let us dig right in.
I'd like to read a quote from Paul's letter to the Philippians, chapter 3, verses 10 to 11.
I wish to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and the sharing of his sufferings,
by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Probably most of our strongest memories and most positive feelings as Christians revolve
around the celebration of Christmas, the bright lights, the decorations, the festive colors,
the gift-giving, the good cheer, the wonderful aromas of food, favorite food, the family
celebrations, the cultural, all the cultural hoopla.
All of this makes Christmas, I think, a magical time, certainly for children, and generally
speaking, a happy time for adults.
Yet, the Triduum, what we call the Triduum, the Passover of the Lord, the Pascha of Jesus
Christ, according to Christian teaching, remains the center of Christian faith.
Why isn't it as popular as Christmas?
Even liturgically, there are far more people who will attend the Christmas liturgy and
the Christmas midnight mass and vigil than you'll see at the Easter vigil and services.
Perhaps Easter is not as popular as Christmas because it's about suffering and death.
And that is not popular with us.
Also, maybe part of the reason is, for most of us, the vast majority, we have been baptized
as infants, as children, and very few of us have been baptized as adults.
And so, baptism, for us, is associated with an infant, with birth, with nativity, with
the joy of new life, which again is associated with Christmastime, not with Easter, not with
suffering and death of an adult.
And even that season that surrounds Easter, Lent, traditionally involves asceticism, sacrifice,
a certain amount of self-denial, self-examination, conversion and contrition are emphasized,
and even the colors are more somber.
These are not appealing things for us.
We would rather focus on Christmas birth, Christmas joy.
Oddly enough, the rule of St. Benedict asserts that our entire life should be one endless
Lent, looking toward Easter.
It also admonishes us to keep death before us daily.
What does Benedict know that we don't know?
What is his wisdom for us in this regard?
Is he just being gruesome?
We have just celebrated Easter and are now in the full swing of the Easter season, and
this time is called by the Church the Mystagogia, which is meant to be a deepening of our understanding
of the Paschal Mystery, of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.
Therefore, it is good for us to look into Benedict's wisdom now, which is really none
other than the wisdom of the New Testament.
I think what we will discover is that Easter is just as much about birth as Christmas is.
In fact, even more so, for it is from that birth that all other births are born and have
their meaning.
The word Easter comes from the old pagan term for the Spring Festival.
For us, Easter is the liturgical celebration and enactment of the Pascha of Jesus Christ,
his Passover, through suffering and death and from earthly existence into another existence
called Resurrection Life.
Christianity claims this event and mystery to be the central event, not only of Jesus'
life, but we can even say of history, touching everything and everyone.
In fact, at every Eucharist we celebrate it, we participate in it, we proclaim it, saying
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.
We must realize that for the disciples, the first disciples gathered around Jesus, though
they spent some three years associated closely with him and living with him, sharing meals
and lodging with him, traveling with him, listening to him and watching him closely,
though they had the privilege of such intimate and prolonged contact with Jesus, prior to
his death and resurrection, they failed to truly understand his real significance for
their lives, for that of Israel, and they couldn't even begin to imagine his significance
for the whole of humanity and even beyond for the whole creation.
Up to that point, they had come to see him merely as the fulfillment of their common
popular messianic hopes, as a great prophet and healer and teacher that somehow would
rouse the people and aid them in throwing off the yoke of Roman domination and ushering
in a time of peace and glory for Israel.
The secret of Jesus' life, its meaning, became apparent to the disciples and even
to Jesus only through the event of his death and resurrection and the experience of his
spirit with them.
Now, this must strike us as rather odd.
How can the horrible end of someone's life reveal the meaning of all that has taken place
before?
Death doesn't give life meaning.
No, we say it robs life of meaning.
Isn't that our experience?
And is it not why we fear death most of all?
As the psalmist in Psalm 39 writes,
Let me know, O Lord, the end, my end, and what is the number of my days, that I may
learn how frail I am.
A short span you have made, my days, and my life is as not before you.
Only a breath is any human existence.
A phantom only, man goes his way, like vapor only are his restless pursuits.
He heaps up stores and knows not who will use them.
We build lives of meaning and death comes along and seems to take it away.
Our life, carefully put together like a stack of cards, one day is folded, is
collapsed by death.
No, I think for us the meaning of life is in the living of it, not the ending.
And this is why we like births, baptisms, infant baptisms, not wakes and funerals
and cemeteries.
When I was young, my one set of grandparents were friends with the
owners of a local funeral parlor.
And these people had a summer cottage, and when the summertime came around, they
had asked my grandparents to live in their living quarters upstairs.
The parlors for the funeral arrangements were downstairs.
And so they would do this for the summer and, of course, when we wanted to see
them, we would go visit them there.
And I always found it rather odd and strange and eerie to go to that place.
I wondered why would anyone live upstairs on top of these parlors where the
deceased were laid out and above the basement where the bodies were embalmed.
I never wanted and I never did ever sleep there with them.
This is the strange paradox of Christianity, isn't it?
Yet Christianity owes its very life, its very existence and birth to the death
and resurrection of Jesus.
In John's gospel particularly, the scene of the crucified Jesus, his side pierced
with blood and water flowing out, is the birth of the church, is the birth of a
new world order, is the beginning of the end of the world, the beginning of the
culmination of all history and evolution.
For John, it is also the moment of Jesus' rebirth, his resurrection.
The secret of birth and death for everyone and everything is revealed
simultaneously at that moment, though it will be manifested a few days later and
absorbed by the disciples over many days and months and even years.
This is why John has Mary and the beloved disciple at the foot of the cross at the
moment of Jesus' death.
I have here beside me one rendition of this scene, an icon rendition, and if you
look at it closely, Mary, the womb that bore him, stands beside him in death.
The womb that bore him stands beside death, the tomb.
Seemingly at opposite ends of each other, the womb and the tomb, but John has them
placed side by side, each looking at the other, each before the other, suggesting
that birth and death, beginning and end, are in some way inseparable.
It's John's way of emphasizing that this death scene is in some mysterious way a
birth scene.
His death, in fact, sheds light on Mary's womb, on Jesus' conception, and what I
would like to call his first birth from the womb of Mary.
His death marks the reason he came into her womb and from it into the world and
human history.
Thus, the womb and tomb are inseparable.
Birth lies at the heart of death and death at the heart of birth.
And for me, this is central to these reflections this weekend.
Let me repeat that.
In some mysterious way, birth lies at the heart of death and death at the heart of
birth.
On the cross, Jesus prepares for another birth, born in death, actually his third
birth, the second having been his own baptism as he plunges into the waters and
emerges, hearing his identity proclaimed, this is my beloved son.
But even more, when he says to her, behold your son, he means both himself, born in
death on the cross, and the beloved disciple, reborn in that same event.
For somehow, mysteriously, they are now one, son in the son.
And when he says to the disciple, behold your mother, he means both Mary and
himself in death, our mother.
One giving birth to the flesh by the power of the spirit, the other giving
birth to the spirit by the power of free dying flesh.
Remember Jesus's words to Nicodemus in John's gospel, entering the kingdom
requires being born from above in water and spirit.
Flesh begets flesh, a necessary first birth, but spirit begets spirit, a second
birth in death, for which the first birth is a preparation.
The text goes on with Jesus saying of his second birth, quote, so must the son of
man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life in
him, end of quote.
And so in the same passage, rebirth and death are mentioned together.
This is why the early fathers of the church, looking at Jesus's death
according to John's gospel, saw Jesus in death as mother.
They wrote that like Adam, who in a deep sleep gave birth to Eve, Jesus, the new
Adam, sleeping the sleep of death on the cross, gives birth to a new humanity, a
new world order, to the fulfillment of God's plan.
From his wounded side, the wound of death, a womb gives birth.
Thus the scriptures say, by his womb we are healed.
I find this to be most important, for it suggests to us that Jesus's death cannot
be separated from his first birth nor his second birth.
St. Paul claims even his first birth required a death, a kind of death, a death
for the word, for the logos.
As Paul writes in Philippians 2, who being in the form of God did not count
equality with God, something to be grasped at.
But emptied himself, and this is what I'm calling a kind of death, but emptied
himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human as we are.
Even the infancy narratives in Matthew and in Luke, we see these two kinds of
death taking place, death stalking him even there in his early life.
There's the death that Herod seeks, the physical death, leading to the feast of
the holy innocence, but also there is the death of poverty there in those early
scenes, nowhere to be born, and eventually being born in a stable.
His utter poverty, having no place of his own, is a kind of death, a kind of
emptying, self-emptying.
This is at the heart of what we call the Paschal mystery, which is central to
Christian faith and Christian daily living.
It is the fundamental pattern imprinted upon all of reality, upon your life and
mine.
And I think this is why St. Paul, who thought he saw his life and its meaning
so clearly in terms of righteousness through perfect obedience of the law, to
the point of defending it against the betrayal of the heretical Christians,
even to the degree of persecution and execution, yet he is suddenly knocked
down to the ground on the way to Damascus and shown how blind he is, even though
his eyes are opened, and he's knocked down in his encounter with the risen
crucified one.
And he only begins to see after three days, reminiscent of Jesus' death and
resurrection, and he eats no food and drink.
Thus his acceptance of Jesus, the crucified risen one, leads to his baptism
and the laying on of hands, and he learns the true meaning of his life and death.
Thus his life is turned completely around.
He is given a new vision and a new name, which is none other than the vision of
Christ for the world in God as one entire unity.
Paul experiences a death and rebirth, and this becomes a repeated pattern in his
life, increasingly so up to his final death, his physical death.
Thus it is this event, Paschal event, which illuminates the meaning of Jesus'
entire earthly life and also marks it.
Everything he ever said or did is illuminated and given its true and fuller
meaning by this event.
Another way we could say it, his entire life is Paschal.
It is in the light of this event that the disciples begin to see who Jesus really
is and what his birth, life, and death and resurrection really mean.
And even further, they gradually begin to see the universal and cosmic
significance of Christ in terms of the overall goal of creation.
He reveals the absolute meaning of existence, the ultimate horizon, against
which and toward which and within which everything has come to be and is
becoming.
The Gospels were written long after this event, when the disciples had sufficient
time to absorb it and live with it a while and preach it and witness its effect
in building up a church, and also when they had enough time to search the
risen one.
When there had been enough time for the church to grow, being made up of diverse
people, something entirely beyond the power and imagination or originality of
the disciples.
Thus, the dark church and entrance with the Paschal candle at the vigil service
of the Lord's Pasch and the readings beginning with Genesis through all of
Jewish history.
What we claim is his death, resurrection illuminates all this by illuminating the
end goal for which it was all created.
And each of us carries our own small light lit from Christ, the Paschal candle.
But we are caught up in this dynamic.
He is not just a hero that we admire from afar.
He is our life, our light, our suffering and death, our resurrection, our future,
breaking into our lives now, bringing about transformation.
This is why baptisms are done at this time.
If this is who Jesus is, then I want to be plunged into his life and death so that I
might find the true meaning of my life.
Baptism is a symbolic experience and a means of experience and bringing to
consciousness what Christ has already given.
It is my conscious choosing.
The death and resurrection of Jesus, therefore, illuminates his entire life.
And for John, even his pre-existence.
And as such, illuminates everything, everything else going back to the first
moment of creation and forward to the end of the world as we know it.
So he is, therefore, the center.
And this divine pattern that we call the Paschal pattern imprints his life,
imprints all of life.
I'd like to stop here and give you some scriptures for further reflection.
John's Gospel, Chapter 3, verses 1 to 16.
Chapter 19, verses 25 to 37.
Philippians 2, 6 to 11.
Acts 9, verses 1 to 22.
Romans 7, 24 and following.
Philippians 3, verses 10 and 11.
Galatians 1, 1 to 5.
Galatians 2, verses 19 to 21.
That's a rather powerful excerpt where Paul says,
I've been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive.
Yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me.
I am living in faith and faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
So that ends our first talk.
So that ends our first talk.
So that ends our first talk.