Saint Frances Cabrini Parish

Father Kleppner - March 20^th 2005

As we approach Holy Week and the celebration of the passion and death of Our Lord, the following reflection by Msgr. Richard Antall in this week’s Our Sunday Visitor warrants our prayerful reading.

Remembering we are dust

When distributing ashes on Ash Wednesday I prefer to say, “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return,” rather than the simpler, “Repent and believe the Good News.” Both options are approved by the Church, both are biblical (Genesis is the source of the first of the two options), and both catch the ear, but I like the first because I think the basis of our conversion is our recognition that there is another life after this one.
Shakespeare said it well: “We owe God a death.” Lent is a perfect time to think about that. I have read of priests, years ago, who had skulls on their desks to remind themselves – and those whom they directed spiritually – of the reality of death.
Many classic paintings and statues show saints, like the penitent St. Mary Magdalene and St. Francis of Assisi, meditating their lives with the symbol of mortality close at hand. Legend has it that some saints slept in caskets as a sort of preparation for when they would have to pay the “debt of nature.”
To see how far modern sensibility shies from such practices and thoughts we only have to look at popular culture. Death is often treated with burlesque exaggeration and bizarre humor. Skulls are for Halloween, not for meditation on the precariousness of our life. Cemeteries are for spooky stories, not places for prayer.
Parodying death
Even movies that play on our fears of death more often veer toward self-parody. Popular culture does not like to take death seriously. It is a taboo subject in a society where almost anything else goes.
In hospitals, it seems to me, death is an embarrassment, made unreal by an atmosphere of complicated machinery, lights and monitors – and then is curtained off.
The dead are sequestered to the mortuary and not seen even by the family until they have received a makeover. That is not so in all places, especially poor countries where the reality of death cannot be so easily sanitized.
At a hospice I visited for AIDS patients run by the Missionaries of Charity, someone asked if the dying should be taken out of the dormitory to not upset the other patients. “No,” was the reply, somewhat to my surprise. “The patients need to see that there is beauty even in death,” said the sister.
Even some of the popular culture’s flirting with suicide and euthanasia has to do with diminishing the inevitability of death by making it a matter of choice. “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me,” wrote Emily Dickinson.
Our powerlessness
Modern culture in some respects wants to meet death more than half way, almost as if it were possible to make a preemptive strike on mortality. If I can control it, death is somehow subject to me and not I to it.
But the worst thing about death is that it reveals our powerlessness.
“Death spares none of us the full inconvenience of its uncertainty,” said Father Frederick Faber.
Sometimes death shocks us by taking someone away very suddenly and at other times tortures us by being slow to close the lives of others. And that is without mentioning our own deaths. When will it come? How will it come?
“The long habit of living,” said British author Thomas Browne, “indisposeth us for dying.” It does not exactly dispose us to thinking about it either. That is a bit ironic when you look at our Catholic religious practice. We have crucifixes all over the place.
The center of our worship is about the death of our Lord. “Everytime we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim Your death, Lord Jesus, until You come in glory.”

FATHER KLEPPNER ARCHIVES

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Father Kleppner - March 20th 2005

Remembering we are dust

FATHER KLEPPNER ARCHIVES

St. Frances Cabrini Parish

Father Kleppner - March 20^th 2005