Fifth Sunday in Lent: Learning to Die

“We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. AS children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and heath, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word ‘good’ should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

“Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

“Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die everyday, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn one day closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.’ Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.”
John Richard Neuhaus, As I Lay Dying. Meditations upon Returning (New York: Basic, 2002), 3-4.

“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam we all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.” (1 Cor. 15:20-22)