In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

I spent the last week in February this year on a week-long meditation  -- "Memento mori."   

This isn't exactly difficult for me, since I've had a certain morbid fascination with the whole issue of time and decay since I was rather young.   In high school, some of my favorite music included the Mozart Requiem, the Brahms Requiem, the Rutter Requiem . . .  Well, you get the picture.

This year, Ash Wednesday fell in the middle of last week also.  I was walking to work, when a businessman hustled in front of my with the black ash cross inscribed on his forehead.  . . .   Now I grew up in a church that lived far too much in its head -- as if belonging meant more of a matter of subscribing to correct beliefs than taking particular actions (or rather, actions flowed from correct belief, but no belief flowed from actions) -- The common phrase for "how long have you belonged to this church?" used to be "How long have you been in the Truth?" . . .   In later life, I have discovered how belief and physicality can reinforce each other, as on Ash Wednesday, when one kneels before a priest and feels the slightly gritty, ash-y cross being inscribed on one's forehead as the priest murmurs: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."   Pure physicality is reinforcing something spiritual -- a moment from eternity is entering a quiet church and forcing us to confront our own frailty.  We kneel before it in silence (or perhaps listening to Psalm 51 being said or chanted) - that moment echoes down the centuries, from when the priests said: "Memento quia pulvis es, et in pulverum reverteris."

I missed that action this year, and yet life found a way to remind me that dust I am, and to dust I shall return.  My uncle died on Shrove Tuesday (or "Fat Tuesday," for those more accustomed to New Orleans), the day before Ash Wednesday.  . . .  My father's older brother, I always thought of him as my "Chamber of Commerce" uncle -- owned an auto parts store, played golf, was a Shriner, and a civic leader in his particular Midwestern town.   I drove 5 hours to get to his funeral, arriving just in time for the family to solemnly walk into the church.  A shaky Soprano sang "Beyond the Sunset," and the minister gave a summary of my Uncle's life.   He had declined from a vibrant civic leader, and died a frail old man, beloved, but facing the possibility of assisted living.  "Memento quia pulvis es, et in pulverum reverteris."

And this brought me to music by Henry Purcell.  In 1695, Queen Mary II of England died.  Purcell wrote some of the most profound anthem/meditations on death that I've heard.  Here are the words:

"MAN that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, 0 Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, 0 Lord God most holy, 0 Lord most mighty, 0 holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, 0 God most mighty, 0 holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee." (from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer's "Burial of the Dead.")

Through actions like Ash Wednesday, and through the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer set to music, I find the sort of comfort needed when I am confronting deaths, like that of my uncle.  I sometimes think it is easier to deal with the idea of eternity through art than through logic.   And it was only when that art took my outside my own head that I began to find a way to deal with the unrelenting change and the rush towards my own mortality that is coming more and more clearly into focus as I approach middle age.