Holy Week.
The words land with the weight of all they hold, like the solid thump of a massive tome closed at the end of the story. As if to say, “Well, that’s that.” Here we’ve read the book on death and found that it ends with life, and we can close it once and for all, shelve it as “read” and move on.
Meanwhile, my email tells me a dear friend’s husband is on hospice, my text messages report that a friend’s grandfather has died, and social media brings news of one whose words have brought me life fighting a battle with bones that are dying. All of these right here where I live, without even looking beyond my local community. Were I to expand my gaze, I would find death on the rampage on a scale so large I cannot take in with any real understanding, settling only for abstractions of the griefs I have known imagined in waves incomprehensible. This book is not on the shelf, and we feel the weight of it as we hurtle toward the harrowing, going through hell in the process.
Life as we know it is laced with death.
I cannot enter Holy Week without waving palms and singing hosannas, and I cannot wave the palms without feeling in them the ash they will become at the beginning of Lent next year. It’s not just palms that will become Wednesday’s ashes, but these palms. It is not just people whom death has marked, but these people. Life as I know it is laced with death.
St. Benedict, in his Rule, admonishes those in monastic communities to “keep death always before your eyes.” In the translation I use, it says, “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.” In the Latin, it reads, “mortem cotidie ante oculos suspectam habere” or, literally, “hold death suspect daily before the eyes.” Suspectam is left out of more or less every translation of the Rule I have read, which makes me wonder — what does it mean to hold death suspect?
As I have mentioned before, I have a few suspicions about death:
I suspect death isn’t what we think it is.
I suspect death doesn’t hold the power it pretends to.
I suspect death isn’t as final as it feels.
I suspect there is more to death than I am often willing to explore.
And I suspect that death, as we know it, is laced with life.
For the last few years, one of my practices has been to work on a painting over the course of Lent. It often begins on Ash Wednesday with the pressing of the canvas to my forehead. I may or may not paint over this ashen cross, but I know it is there, the beginning of my journey into the wilderness, the beginning of my exploration in this season of what it is to be made of dust and returning to it. I never know what the painting, or I, will become over the course of Lent, and I give myself complete freedom to paint as I feel led, even if that means painting over the canvas entirely, time and time again as the season unfolds. (I’ve never done that, but the permission is there.) This year, the painting took shape early on and has sat more or less complete for the past couple weeks. It is unlike anything I have painted before, and I’m not entirely sure where she comes from, this figure whose gaze reflects the cross.
“Who is she?” is the question that rises to the surface every time I look at her. She makes me uncomfortable, the way she fills the canvas and spills over it, mid-gasp, as if she holds a knowing that will not be constrained to the physical space she is offered to occupy. Is she me? Is she my daughter, whose infant features helped shape her initial sketch? I haven’t settled on an answer, and she has remained a mystery with ashes for eyes for weeks. On the threshold of Holy Week, however, she began to whisper on the way to the cross on which her gaze is fixed.
She is, perhaps…
…Mary at her fiat, saying yes to life, even as it looks like death.
…Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who sees Jesus’ death coming and anoints him for death even as she knows He is master of it, for her brother lives.
…Leslie, who sees the beauty that lies beyond the veil of death.
…A Benedictine, with death always before her eyes, who sees it for what it is and not what it would claim to be.
…Wisdom, reframing death for the living. She does not deny death, but puts it in its place.
…Sister Death, as introduced by St. Francis, as Sister Bodily Death, whom no one living can escape.
…The Maiden of Death and the Maiden, who keeps making her way across my path, introducing me to Death in all his various forms.
For the second year in a row, I find myself walking with others through Holy Week on the brink of loss. For most of my years, this was a week of looking forward to Easter, because mine was a closed-book theology of celebration: I’d read the end and we win, enough said. Book shelved, 5 stars given. The historical Christ has died, and he has risen, and we live in a post-resurrection world where death has been stripped of its power and sin has lost its hold on us. Why go back and re-read the story when we already know how it ends? Why re-read the parts that make us cry, when we know our tears will turn to laughter? Why go through the on-again off-again parts of the relationship when we know they get married and live happily ever after?
But this year, as last, I find myself lingering in the week, sitting with those who grieve, being present to suffering in a way the distraction of most weeks doesn’t afford me. How can I mourn with those who mourn if I will not look death in the eye and see it for all it is? I am keenly aware that I do not observe Easter Week, with its rush to the finish line. This is Holy Week, wherein we walk with Christ and He walks with us, through consolation, desolation, and isolation, through suffering and sorrow, through revelry and rejoicing, through death and life, and all of it called holy.
I’ve read the book. I know what’s coming, all the heartbreak and horror, the dark before the dawn. It will break me again, and then it will make me anew. This one is too good to sit on the shelf getting dusty, no matter heavy and long it feels. For if we must walk through death, let us do so staring it in the eyes, seeing it for what it is. Life, as I know it, is laced with death. But this story, this week, walks me through the truth that death, as I know it, is laced with life. This is the harrowing, wherein an implement consisting of a heavy frame set with teeth is dragged over land to break up clods, remove weeds, and cover seed.
The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope,
while darkness does its work.
~Wendell Berry
The Artist’s Way: Week 12 Check-in (Chapters 11-12)
I am here at the end of my Artist’s Way journey. I’m glad I read the book, and there are things I found helpful from it. But much of the author’s assumptions are that artists are remaining “blocked” throughout the twelve weeks, and it felt like the later chapters were less helpful as a result. That said, I appreciated these quotes in particular from chapters 11 and 12.
“I must learn that as an artist my credibility lies with me, God, and my work. In other words, if I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem — whether it will sell or not.”
“The creator made us creative. Our creativity is our gift from God. Our use of it is our gift to God.”
“All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be able to be productive.”
So, I’ll leave it there. If you feel like you want to be creative but just aren’t, or you think you’re creative but keep getting in your own way, it might be a good book for you. However, I read Naming the Animals by Stephen Roach a couple weeks ago and commented to my friend that it’s what I wish we’d read instead. That one’s fantastic and one I highly recommend.
Poetry: On Holy Week
This year the Feast of the Annunciation fell on Monday of Holy Week, and interesting juxtaposition tying Advent and Lent in my imagination.
Heartbeat
His heart beat
in the darkness
of the wombHe broke forth as light
in the darkness
of the tombLife entered
the dead
that the dead
might liveHis heart beat
with ours
that our hearts
might beat with HisAnd when His heart
started beating
in the darkness of the tombThis world became
for us the darkness
of a womb.
One of the stories of Holy Week is Jesus clearing the temple. This poem came out of a conversation with my daughter earlier in the year, and it feels fitting in this week.
Jesus is a Disruptor
God is love.
The Spirit is peace.
But Jesus? Jesus is a disruptor.
He steps into the temple
we would make of ourselves
and overturns the tables
of our profit-making hearts.
Without this disruption
there is no peace
there is no love.
And we are not a temple
but a marketplace.
Last Holy Week I spent in vigil for Leslie Bustard, who passed away not long after. This is one of the poems I wrote in that season. It takes on new meaning this year.
Holy Saturday
How fitting that as she rests
in the liminal, between life and death,
Christ rests with her on this Holy Saturday.Having brought Life to death.
shining light on the darkest corners of hell,
we wait for Him to rise like the dawn - and her as well.But first we wait in hope,
while darkness does its work.
This is hell, and we are being harrowed, too.
Blessed Holy Week to you all. Pax vobiscum.
This has been such a soul enriching read. Thank you, Elizabeth, for all you offer through your writing and other creative work.
I finally had a moment to sit down and focus on this, and it turns out it was the right time. Yesterday, early on Easter morning, a friend’s father lost his long cancer battle, and an older friend from church lost a short cancer battle (his was brain cancer, and I kept thinking of Leslie this time last year). Anyway, it really was a juxtaposition of sorrow and joy. Your thoughts put a lot of that to words.