A Different Darkness

No one here gets out alive

My wife and I spent many hours praying with my mother in her final illness. After receiving the sacrament of anointing, she felt a kind of peace I’d never seen in her before.

The hospital room was like any other. The people gathered around the bed seemed shocked, crushed, drained. But the woman on the bed--the woman who was the center of all this emotion--looked, to my eyes, almost radiant. The smile was a smile of peace, not joy--a smile transcending all things. It was an expression of letting go, and being glad to let go.

Having seen it more than once, I tried not to read too much into it. Nurses and doctors might just call it a morphine smile, and maybe they're right. But that doesn't explain the double sight of eyes that see this world and all they love in this world, and at the same time see something impossibly beautiful in and through and beyond it.

I'm not even talking about the final clarity that provides the gift of visions for some, including my father. It's the moment near death when even the pain--which can become like some living thing crouching on the chest and chewing every nerve ending--begins to seem like less of a burden because the person senses soon the pain will end.

It is peace, and it is horrible and beautiful at the same time. When someone dies, it rips a hole in the universe, and we better attend to that moment. If it is a person we love, particularly if it is an untimely death, the hole in the universe opens right in the center of our heart and threatens to drag us into a darkness that can seem impossible to escape. It can feel like there will never be light again.

But that is our darkness to deal with. The woman in the bed, however, was on the cusp of passing beyond all darkness. She had buried a husband and parents, so she too had stood vigil beside hospital beds, but beyond that I knew nothing more. Perhaps she had lost a child, or a close friend, or her first and best love who never made it home from the war. Certainly she'd lived the darkness we all live, in those moments from childhood's fear to adulthood's responsibility to old age's gradual theft of health and independence. No one on God's good earth escapes the darkness. Some have more than their share and others less, but we all pass through the shadows. As Augustine wrote, God had one son without sin, but none without suffering.

And yet, and yet ... here she was seeming to me almost weightless in that last, terrible bed. She was not what we call "actively dying," but she wasn't going to be leaving the hospital. The family excused themselves and we smiled at each other and had a moment where I prayed for her and with her and held her hand and gave her the eucharist. She was sweet and at peace. Patients often are: it's the family who suffers. We are never ready. We know the moment is coming, it may have been coming for years, and we are still never ready. I'm not sure we even can be: it's that hole in the universe. Until it opens, we can't really know.

That's because it matters. It changes reality for someone--anyone--to die. Someone who was part of our material world is now something else. They are becoming. They are being reborn, and birth is painful. We don't remember being born into the world, but it was no doubt traumatic being pulled from the warm darkness and into the harsh light. The darkness of the womb was our peace and the world was the new and frightening thing.

Death reverses that. We leave the light and enter a different darkness. Our bodies are sown into the soil where they wait until the last trumpet, when God shall summon all that seed to sprout and rise to new and eternal life.

We die to the world in the waters of baptism and are reborn in Christ. When we die the second time, we are reborn into the presence of the God who judges the living and the dead. Those who are called will prepare to experience all things in God and God and God in all things. We will see even as we are seen. Those of us left behind do not have that gift of sight, but we must have faith in it. We must know that those we love have passed beyond this weary world and now, we hope, are bathed in the light of glory.

In the sayings of the Desert Fathers, there is a story about a dying man whose children weep at his bedside. He opens his eyes three times and laughs each time. They ask him why he laughs at their tears. He replies, “I laughed the first time because you fear death; I laughed the second time because you are not ready for death; I laughed the third time, because I am passing from labour to rest, and yet you weep.” And then, in peace, he dies.

I was not with the woman in the bed when she died, but I shared one more moment with her that lingers with me. She said that her late husband was in the room at the moment, but she did not expect me to see him. When she'd told her family, they called the nurse, thinking she was hallucinating—but she thought, being clergy, I might believe her. I told her that of course I believed her (I've experienced much stranger things than that), and asked if he gave her comfort or frightened her. She said it made her so happy. I suggested that perhaps then it was her husband, that this sometimes happens, and there is nothing to fear.

Not everyone is given that grace, but it occurs more than you might imagine, and there are probably even more who never admit it. I've heard all manner of rationalistic explantations for the phenomena, which seems like a lot of work to explain a very simple thing: God loves us. Whether He sent her husband or merely provided a vision of him, the result was the same: God comforted his beloved daughter as she drew close to death, and this assured her there was nothing more to fear.

Death should never lose its horror to us. Death is a violation of what God intended from the beginning. Death is the cross in all its brutality, and each of us will one day hang on that cross. But it shouldn't fill us with dread either, because we are a people of hope. When evil men were finished with the cross, Christ used it to smash open the doors to eternity. Every deathbed is another cross, and there's one fitted for you and me and everyone we love. One day our cross will become a bridge to pass from this valley of tears and into everlasting life. It will be truly terrible. It will also be unbearably beautiful.

Notes

Leo, Augustine, Rocks, and Isaac the Syrian

I remain optimistic about Leo XIV, and urge you to follow some of the early addresses and homilies that are at the Vatican website in order to get a sense of the man and his priorities. He still speaks Vaticanese at times: I’d like to never hear the words encounter or synodality again, but that’s my problem not his.

As I mention in my biography, I’ve spent a lot of time with Augustine, and I made his writing and that of Benedict XVI (also profoundly Augustinian) a focus of my first theology degree. I’m glad to see this aspect of Leo’s thought already emerging in his statements.

There’s been some fuss (and some downright lies) about him allegedly denying papal primacy. This is the passage that has some people worked up:

The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus “is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone” (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Pet 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them, for all of us are “living stones” (1 Pet 2:5), called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of Saint Augustine: “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour” (Serm. 359,9).

There’s nothing in here denying that Peter is the rock, and Peter actually means rock, and the name was given to him by Jesus, so that subject seems pretty settled. And you know what, Jesus is also the rock (1 Cor. 10:4). So is God (Deut. 32:4). So is justice (Is. 8:14). It’s almost like symbols can stand for more than one thing.

It’s quite clear that Leo is trying to begin his pontificate with the kind of ecumenical outreach that gives some people the vapors, but which is both a demand of Christ (John 17:21), and a simple matter of sharing a world with people of multiple faiths. In particular, I see a real effort of outreach to the Eastern Churches, and I welcome it because I find much in Eastern theology and liturgy that will enrich the West. I don’t, however, believe the Orthodox will welcome it.

His address to the Eastern Churches was a beautiful statement, and this passage was remarkable:

The Church needs you. The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense! We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty! It is likewise important to rediscover, especially in the Christian West, a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity (penthos)! It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.

Your traditions of spirituality, ancient yet ever new, are medicinal. In them, the drama of human misery is combined with wonder at God’s mercy, so that our sinfulness does not lead to despair, but opens us to accepting the gracious gift of becoming creatures who are healed, divinized and raised to the heights of heaven. For this, we ought to give endless praise and thanks to the Lord. Together, we can pray with Saint Ephrem the Syrian and say to the Lord Jesus: “Glory to you, who laid your cross as a bridge over death… Glory to you who clothed yourself in the body of mortal man, and made it the source of life for all mortals” (Homily on our Lord, 9). We must ask, then, for the grace to see the certainty of Easter in every trial of life and not to lose heart, remembering, as another great Eastern Father wrote, that “the greatest sin is not to believe in the power of the Resurrection” (SAINT ISAAC OF NINEVEH, Sermones ascetici, I, 5).

Some critics are already bewailing his citation of St. Isaac of Nineveh, claiming the saint (who shares a feast day with fellow Syrian St. Ephraim in the Martyrologium Romanum) was a schismatic. The documents about the life of Isaac are very limited, and none of them state he was in schism at the time of his death, so they can’t possibly know that. He was elevated to the episcopacy by a Nestorian bishop, but left that role after five months and retreated to the desert where he wrote influential texts—none of them heretical—on asceticism.

It’s also important to note that not everything a saint or Church Father writes has to be correct. Augustine and Thomas were wrong at times. Tertullian and Origen are Church Fathers in spite of their heresies. People need to get a grip.

And anyone claiming they understand the fullness of Isaac’s thought is in better shape than almost every scholar of mysticism, including his translator AJ Wensinck, who remarked:

I must confess that the author’s intention has not always become clear to me. I hope that some of the readers may be in better condition. The reason why I have yet decided to trust this book to the press, is that Isaac may be called one of the most genuine and profound representatives of Oriental mysticism.

Substack has been flushing a number of people into my feed who are writing from a radical traditionalist perspective that is in itself often heterodox. Be wary of what you read, and always return to primary sources.

I think our new pope is making a good impression. I was told that a hundred men showed up to an Augustinian vocation inquiry after the election. Also, he settled one of the important issues of our time: