I don’t recall when memento mori became a leitmotif in the round of my days; I only know that it has done. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we priests say to others on Ash Wednesday. Now, sans ashes, my heart often tells me the same. Perhaps it is merely a part of aging, a way of beginning to face one’s own shortness of days. It may also be a gift of offering pastoral care, of time spent with the diminishing, the dying, the dead, and the grieving. It is a gift to be invited onto this holy ground, to accompany my brothers and sisters on this part of their journey. It becomes part of my journey, too — a very sacred part that I treasure up and ponder in my heart.

My wife and I are bibliophiles. A few days ago, when a box arrived for me from Amazon, she asked me what I was reading. “Living Well and Dying Faithfully,” I said. Also lying there on my current stack of reading material was “Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life” and “The Gift of Peace,” the latter a personal reflection on his own illness and impending death by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. My wife is a bit concerned. “Do you ever read anything not about dying?” she asked. Partially to assuage her concern, I ordered the new Daniel Silva / Gabriel Allon novel “An Inside Job”. It arrived today and I now have it lying on the table between us as we enjoy a quiet afternoon reading on the back porch. I hope it makes her feel better.

There is nothing morbid in all this; at least I do not think so. “So teach us to number our days / that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” we pray in Psalm 90. Why, then, should we fear the arithmetic?

In his book, Cardinal Bernardin recalls a meeting with his friend Henri Nouwen. He writes:

We spent an hour together, and he brought me one of his latest books, “Our Greatest Gift: A Reflection on Dying and Caring”. We talked about the book, and the main thing I remember is that he talked about the importance of looking on death as a friend rather than an enemy. While I had always taken such a view in terms of my faith, I needed to be reminded at that moment because I was rather exhausted from the radiation treatments. “It’s very simple,” he said. “If you have fear and anxiety and you talk to a friend, then those fears and anxieties are minimized and could even disappear. If you see them as an enemy, then you go into a state of denial and try to get as far away as possible from them.” He said, “People of faith, who believe that death is the transition from this life to life eternal, should see it as a friend” (Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, The Gift of Peace, Loyola Press (1997), pp. 127-128).

I can see how that might be comforting. But I cannot see how it might be true. It is not possible even to make sense of death — much less to befriend it — in God’s creation. Death is always senseless, though not always meaningless, and never without purpose. So we are told in our books of wisdom:

¹² Do not invite death by the error of your life,
nor bring on destruction by the works of your hands;
¹³ because God did not make death,
and he does not delight in the death of the living.
¹⁴ For he created all things that they might exist,
and the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them;
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
¹⁵ For righteousness is immortal.

¹⁶ But ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death;
considering him a friend, they pined away,
and they made a covenant with him,
because they are fit to belong to his party (Wisdom of Solomon 1:12-16).

We Christians do not befriend death; we taunt it:

All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia (BCP 2019, p. 256).

We Christians do not befriend death; we mock it:

54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

55 “O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting” (1 Cor 15:54-55, ESV).

We Christians do not befriend death; we stand before it and sing its own demise:

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

We Christians do not befriend death; through Christ — son of Eve, son of Mary, Son of God — we crush its head even as it most painfully bruises our heel.

I have seen too much death to think of it as friend. It is enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Cor 15:26), even in those times when it provides relief from pain. If it were friend, surely there would be a place prepared for it in the Kingdom of God, when heaven and earth are one. But, no:

4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (Rev 21:4).

East of Eden, death is a devastating, damnable enemy. East of Calvary — to the east lies the rising of the sun — death is a defeated, detestable enemy, one we neither befriend nor fear.