The grim reaper can kiss my sad, angry and depressed white tookis. Apparently, though, he can also fuck up spiritual journeys. The rattle of his boney and terminal giggling is a real thing. My prayer practice has never had an answer for the scriptural question “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Evidently I don’t know, because I’ve heard at least 5 men take their last, crackling breaths, and it’s still taken me 38 years to write this.
Liz Kubler-Ross, that great ninja of demise, would have said “denial is the first stage of dying.” Father Francis, my first superior and the first monk to die after I entered Mepkin, rallied one last time on his deathbed. He sat up and announced “I’m 98% alive” and then lapsed back into non-responsiveness. Father Stan, who would take Francis’ place as Abbot, heard of it and remarked “It's more like he's 98% dead.” Both men were right, I think, but that’s not the point. The point is twofold. For one thing, back then, I’d have heard Gospel stories without allowing them to sink in. Jesus would have told Mary Magdeline not to hold on to him, that he hadn’t ascended to the Father, and the only place the words would have ascended for me is in one ear, out the other. I was, however, at lest beginning to understand something on a real level: denial is the first stage of any transition. Nowadays I can confirm this because, amidst the shifts in my life, I’ve denied a good bit.
I think zeal is a depressant. That is to say: it deadens the knowledge of one's own spiritual, physical and emotional life. I took this drug in my first years as a monk: it fueled my denial for a great many years. The emotional novelty of the prayer journey made it easy to meditate, easy to fast and deny myself sleep, easy to work for others at the expense of myself. During those years, while working with Mepkin’s nurse in ministering to the dying, I gave old Brother Luke a beer each day as his death neared. After he died, I absconded with the last beer, took it back to my cell and drank it in 20 seconds. Zeal was a drug, most certainly. And eventually the drugs don’t work like they used to.
In the midst of all these men letting go of their mortal flesh, I was just beginning to deal with my own mortality. I’ve said this before: years of living with a mild disability left me with mild PTSD and a tendency to dissociate. So It struck me as particularly strange, when pain stored in my left shoulder or my legs began to distract my meditation. I dealt with this two ways: either I focused on the pain, mentally commanding it to relax, or I ignored it and returned to my breath. I didn’t know it at the time, but both methods were missteps that neglected reality. Trying to meddle with my body’s physical sensations confused attention with force, and ignoring them spiritualized avoidance. I wasn’t listening: my body was trying to tell me I was powerless.
The powerlessness of being beholden to Providence is an important starting point. Quite simply, to start elsewhere is to avoid a basic human truth. However, my discomfort with that truth sent me scrambling toward intellectualism, and another one of Lizzy K Ross’s steps: Bargaining.
Apparently, I like good bargains, and drive them hard and constantly. For instance: since I had ignored my feelings for years, when I first realized I had them, I got too caught up in their intellectual examination. During those years, I’d have said “Anger is sadness we don’t want to admit.” I’d have had midrashim for every situation. I’d have said “Our life echoes the life of the Trinity.” Then I’d have begun plagiarizing again, this time from Cynthia Bourgealt, whose work I’ll reference later. To crappily paraphrase: All three persons of the Trinity proceed in an interconnected dance from fullness to emptiness. The Father waltzes from fullness to emptiness. The Son lindy hops from fullness to emptiness. And the Spirit does the freaking charleston, again from fullness to emptiness.
Back then and quite sadly, I thought death would be worth it, so long as it yielded its cow pies of insight. For your edification (or whatever) here are a couple of those steaming piles:
- There’s a bloke in the gospels whom Jesus appears to rebuke. The man wants to follow Christ, and says “Let me first go in bury my father.” Church people assume Christ’s response is a corrective: “Follow me,” he says “and let the dead bury their own dead.” However, like a gladiator’s cry of “we who are about to die salute you,” this is Christ’s acknowledgment that the person who had asked to bury his father had, in a way just as literal but less physical, died as well. The opening sentence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship is instructive here: when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die. To the man with the dead parent, it’s as if Christ had said “Yes, go bury the dead. But know that your discovery of a desire to follow me is a death too. You'll learn the art of dying from your father first, then you’ll learn it from me.”
- Self-emptying is not self-emptying if my intent remains intact. That is, if I am wanting total kenosis, I may arrive, instead, at emptiness of everything except my self. There’s too much I, and too much wanting, blocking my desired renunciation. Jesus's time in the desert proves that ascetical tasks we take on willingly are easier. They leave our willingness intact. Jesus's death proves that renunciations with which we are saddled sit more awkwardly on our backs
All of this is absolutely true. Life really is a journey from fullness to emptiness. The borrowing of words, though—the clinging to insight—masks the fact that half of that cycle scares me shitless. Paying attention to bereftness is not one of my talents--not even in exchange for insight.
Remember that thing I did after old brother Luke died? I had a beer. Had I been awake enough, I’d have seen this simple deed pointing my way through another one of Liz’s steps: Depression. The unfortunate truth is that, upon leaving the monastery, alcohol replaced zeal as my depressant of choice. While I would not go so far I as to call myself an alcoholic currently, the Alcoholics Anonymous 24 hour sobriety token I carry permanently in my pocket certainly testifies to the fact that I’ve thought about it. What I know now, and know for certain is: After the monastery, I used a depressant to drive out depression. By and by, these years proved the maxim “If Satan drives out Satan, his kingdom cannot stand.” I came to question whether my depression wasn’t self-inflicted—induced by morbid fascination with feelings I couldn't change—and whether alcohol best remedied the problem when it still, occasionally, arose.
Two things happened, to initiate a shift, within the span of a few months. First, at the Catholic School where I teach religion, we had Ash Wednesday Mass. At the last minute, I was asked to distribute ashes. It was an easy task to accept on the fly, as I was a church nerd from of old, comfortable with the role’s ceremonial words and actions. So, person after person approached: Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. That day, my last taker was a woman holding her 6 year old daughter’s hand. I distributed ashes to the mother, then paused tentatively. The woman knew what I had in mind, and with a glance indicated consent. I took a knee, blackened my thumb, and told the 6 year old she was going to die. Afterwards, it struck me how odd and important it is, this task we have of helping the young prepare for death. In my head, the words sounded older than I felt. Perhaps, I thought, I had grown a little closer to accepting my own mortality.
On the recommendation of a friend, I bought a book on tape copy of Cynthia Bourgealt’s The Wisdom Jesus. In some respects the book was hard to get through: it vacillated a bit too haphazardly between being written for serious practitioners (such as myself, thank you very much) and newcomers to monastic practices. But it made points whose salience is undeniable. One of Bourgealt’s sacred cow pies is this: self-emptying happens on the level of energy, not intellect. It led me to a piece of insight. Self-emptying can’t be called by that name, for me, until the body that I’ll die in becomes my teacher. In prioritizing method, I ignored the data that the tensions in my body can reveal. I had lost sight of my emotions for the insight they yielded. But that data itself is counter-intuitive. The body doesn't have a lot to say. It does, however, contain much to be felt.
And so I refocused my practice, and it brings me back to what was, ultimately, an old truth: Like St. Paul, we die daily. We do it in union with Antony of the Desert, to whom those words were famously reapplied. I do it in union with Br. Edward, the old monastic cook. Third class relics of Ed—things he’s touched, not bits of his bones— hang framed in my kitchen. While I cook I remember how he carried cancer around for two years. The whole time, he was undiminished, to the befuddlement of his doctors, in the ability to care for others and himself. I was in formation at the time, which meant showing up at more classes than I cared to attend, having more responsibility than I could handle, and sitting through more meetings with my junior master than were helpful in dealing with it all. In any case, Eddie knew I found formation a chore. He said something, by and by, that humbled me. “I haven’t opened the Rule of Benedict since I was a novice” he said. Then, pointing to his swollen midsection and legs, where the cancer had visibly taken up residence, he said “but I suppose dealing with this is my formation." In the end, Ed’s body was his teacher.
These days, part of my practice is a simple yoga nidra meditation. This “sleep meditation” is cause for a simple body scan, cause for seeing the tension I’ve stored there. The old struggle, of trying to resolve or ignore tension, is less of a problem because I’m half-conscious when it happens. These days I feel my feelings more often, even if I can't describe them. Closing the I that prays for a while limits my tendency to extract teachings from prayer-times, provides less material to later egotistically misuse.
Each person’s body is an exhortation. This is what Jesus was teaching Mary Magdeline while I ignored it. This is what Eddie was teaching me, that I denied, and then medicated for years. Each person’s body is a Koan, an illogical question to which their lives become a single, illogical answer. “Do not hold onto me,” they say “For I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Neither have we, and so letting go is our job, too.
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