Death is suddenly there: a sickness, some hoping, a little rally, and then- nothingness. Frozen eyes, stiffened limbs, the heaviness of entropy. When Death is in front of you, naked, in your home, there is neither sparkling ornaments of glory nor dramatic clothes of nobility and grief. You are stricken with a whip in the face, your feet of clay are crumbled and you are forced to look at the terror and the grotesqueness, the humilation and the deep sorrow. You know death then as punishment, as a ripping, a breaking, something utterly foreign to the momentum of life: and this, even at the death of an animal, a small bird you have loved. You see a hollowed, twisted shell and you remember the inevitability of your death.
Then you cry, for the existential experience of the poor being who has been taken by force from it's earthly home, who has by some mystery, been pulled through a merciless turnstyle, experiencing a pain unknowable, a psychic pain which cannot be a survivor's pain: a supernatural pain.
You cry, when you know in the flesh the permanence of it, and that there is no use to "We should have"- or "next time". The destiny of that being is out of reach for this lifetime, the paths are cut asunder and run now on different planes of existence. You weep, then, with the helplessness of the created: you know both the existence of death and the power of God in the same moment-He who holds life and death in careful hands: but they seem so universal, these hands, like the ten-foot, over-sized, steel-like hands of a Soviet sculpture. You feel that He who understands death is the clock-maker of the Deists, who is simply responding out of eons to some alarm in His workings, and you are not even seen. Your beloved is simply picked up, and is gone; and you are left with the remains, the visceral horror around which you must gather the clothes of ritual.
And later, when you are tired of weeping, you are in God's house, and you ask Him: "Help me to understand this, this death." And He does not speak of the why, or the whereabouts of the dead one, but He looks at you, soul to soul, and He sends you a verse first: "I know when a sparrow falls to the ground"- and He infuses to you a new understanding of the word "know" in that verse; He makes you realize that it is meant as the Genesis-meaning of "to know"- that is, a word more like "to live within" or "to be with in the deepest sense possible to the objective known": that somehow, He knows each death in creation intimately. And your heart contracts in a sudden rush of understanding, when your soul-eyes look into His soul-eyes, and you see Him once again on the cross, turning death backwards with His own death. You see, also, His man's eyes, once also a child's eyes, once also a helpless baby's eyes in the crib at midnight: and in those eyes you see empathy: a simple being with you in your pathos, your grief. You connect with a Person who has known this grief, this death, in the same visceral sense that you have just experienced it. A look steeped in knowing togetherness.
You think, suddenly that God has deemed to be your brother in the flesh at all times, and now especially in your grief. And you know that Love can do no less: and He is no Deist's dream, but Lover in intimacy with all. And the word "How" raises itself to your consciousness, unbidden, and unanswered. You leave that question there, I suppose until you can ask it without sin or vain curiosity.
And you rejoice in this Little Coming in love, like a tryst of lovers in the corner of the church, but your heart expands in the joy of a guilt-less and passionate love, a love born partly of the thrill in the condescention of the Holy Trinity, to visit such a small stable of a soul, a soul wounded by the facing of death.
And you remember it is the beginning of Advent, a coming, and you remember the baby in the crib, hidden at midnight, a baby come to grow and die a shocking and early death. You remember the face of uncorrupted St. Bernadette, and St. Catherine Laboure with her eyes still open in a look of fierce joy. And you allow the experience of death to be a drawing, a drawing like a current in the sea, towards Him.
