WLSU: Love and Death

This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as the holy Christian day we call Ash Wednesday. Of course, Valentine’s Day is always February 14th, but Ash Wednesday is one of those annoying moveable religious holidays that you have to google to figure out when and how it will inconvenience you. This year the most inconvenienced people are the spouses of clergy who had hoped for a date night. But I digress.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent – the penitential season of preparation leading up to Easter. Throughout Lent, the intention is to marry the practical to the religious – by simplifying some aspect of your life in order to make room for prayer and the contemplation of God’s role in your life. And it all begins with Ash Wednesday – a whole day devoted to acknowledging our mortality. This is the day when, if you go to church, you will hear that you’re going to die, and then a priest will clumsily, lovingly smudge ashes on your forehead, look you in the eye, and say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Thinking today of St. Valentine, it’s beautiful that we began Lent celebrating love and death. These two forces are powerfully intertwined.

When I think of death, love is the first thing that comes to my mind. It is. Because when I say death, I think immediately of the people I love who have died. I also think of my own death, and boy do I love me.

As you might imagine, as a priest, I have seen a bit of death. I have been with some people just before they died, some as they died, and still others shortly after their death. And of course I have walked families through funeral planning, and then presided over the service for their loved one.

Each person is unique, and so each situation is radically different. But they all have one thing in common: Each death is drenched in love. I am consistently overwhelmed by it. This is not love as a warm, joyous feeling. This love often shows up couched in grief and sorrow. Soft tears broken up by awkward honest laughter. Long silences, with a lot of staring at the ground. Open grappling with what was about to happen, was happening, had just happened. Heavy hugs. Storytelling, with broken hearts pouring tender affection and admiration into the room. There’s so much love in it all. I have learned to see it woven through the sadness like a bright bolt of color in an otherwise dark cloth.

It was in these spaces that I finally saw how love is eternal.

It took me a long time to see what was actually happening, to see how the love was working in the death. It was just a few years ago, in fact, at a funeral being held at Church of the Redeemer. I had only been here for a few months. A parishioner had died, and his good friend Jim was standing at the lectern delivering the eulogy. He kept speaking of his friend in the present tense. It was noticeable and it was intentional. And Jim knew it. And he said, “You may have noticed that I am speaking of my friend in the present tense. That is because I believe he lives.”

We Christians believe in eternal life. Yet we still manage so often to think and speak of those who have died in the past tense. But Jim is a poet. And though he wasn’t reading a poem here, it takes a poet’s heart to lay bare the beautiful forgotten truth in such simple terms. A man standing mere feet from the ashes of his friend’s body and speaking of him in the present tense.

The words for what I came to understand that day did now show up immediately. But now I have them. When someone dies we do not stop loving them. Our love is not past tense. And it’s not just grief or nostalgia or sentimental memories. It is love in the present tense. It is love that still manages to shape us. We continue to be transformed by love after their death. And I believe I know why. Our loved ones who died are still loving us. They are in eternal life. Right now. They are alive in Christ – not as a metaphor, but as a bare fact. They are in the present tense. Their love is in the present tense. And so is ours.

Our love remains. And when I say our love remains, I am not saying it remains as a stubborn insistence to hold onto what was. No, our love remains because it is alive and active and we continue to share it with the dead who live in the present tense.

We say love conquers death, and that is true, but it’s not the whole truth. Love does not conquer death such that death disappears – at least not any time soon. We still miss people because we are not with them the way we were before. We have to relearn their presence in our life. It is here in the grief of this change that we are tempted to think they are gone, that they are in the past. But if we breathe and pray and listen and look we will know the love we share is still very present. Death, then, transforms our understanding of love, just as love transforms our understanding of death.

How will we love the people in our lives if we understand that death will not be the end of that love? Will not be the end of them, the end of us? It is love that empowers us to see in death the gate to eternal life.

The skull of St. Valentine sits on display in a church in Rome, at rest in a glass reliquary, and crowned with flowers. Love and death.

Earlier this week, I was that priest smudging foreheads with ash, reminding people someday they would die. As I went down the line of people kneeling at the altar rail awaiting their ashes, there was Jim. And I realized as my thumb drew a dark crumbly cross upon his brow and I uttered the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I wasn’t just telling him that he was going to die. I was also telling him that I love him.