A Matter of Life and Death
Some of you have heard me share before about my dear friend Beth. She died, several years ago now, after a valiant journey with brain cancer. Beth was a larger-than-life kind of person. She was someone about whom my grandmother would’ve said, “When God made her, God broke the mold and burned down the factory!” And in Beth’s case, that would absolutely be true. We met in college at the University of Virginia where we were both religious studies majors, and we had both spent time in South Africa in communities affected by HIV/AIDS. Even then, I knew she was one of the most brilliant people I had met or ever would. And she was.
She was also the most strong-willed. There was nothing lukewarm or indecisive about Beth. She had deep convictions—sometimes way more conservative convictions than I did, and we often disagreed. During my last year in college, she converted to Catholicism, and staunchly—sometimes maddeningly—defended the church’s teachings. Thankfully, her heart softened as time went by. She never stopped evolving and growing—that might be the thing I loved most about her. And no matter our disagreements, we never fell out of friendship. She never stopped loving me, and I never stopped loving her.
After college, we lost touch, except through Facebook, but a few years later, completely serendipitously, she and my spouse Michael ended up in the same PhD program in theological ethics—a program she finished in just five years. Somehow, she earned her PhD at age 26. Like I said, she was brilliant. Around the same time, she also met her husband Scott. They married, and shortly after, Beth became a mom, a vocation she threw herself into with full force, just like everything else she committed too. She ultimately decided to abandon her career in academics and started homeschooling her children—in Latin. That was very Beth!
Then one day, just a month after her youngest son and fourth child was born, and five days before Christmas, the unimaginable happened: Beth was diagnosed with a brain tumor—two of them, actually. Glioblastoma. The worst kind of brain tumor. The kind for which there is no cure. It seemed like the cruelest fate possible for someone whose brain and intellect had been so integral to her being in the world. And someone whose heart loved so deeply.
As you can imagine, following her diagnosis, she and her family started to live life with a whole different perspective. Living knowing that death was not an abstract concept anymore, but a close and certain reality. Living knowing that she might live to see 35, but probably not 40. Living knowing that life wasn’t just going to “go on” forever. They had to make some choices, some very intentional choices, choices about how they were going to live in the light of the death. Choices about how they were going to spend the time they had together, knowing that it was limited and precious. After her diagnosis, they squeezed as much life as possible out of the time they had, much of which Beth shared on Instagram, on which she posted thousands of photos of her family’s life for friends and family to see: birthday parties, music lessons, library time, meals, holidays, the passing of the seasons.
As the months passed, we all watched as Beth’s decline became more real. She began walking with a cane, then needed to use a wheelchair. At the end of the summer, she posted that her doctors at the Mayo Clinic had told her she likely wouldn’t be here at Christmas. In mid-October, she started declining more rapidly—she noticed her vision was becoming blurry, and her voice and hearing became much weaker. Then, one day, she could no longer swallow food, except for a few sips of water and the Eucharist.
In spite of all this, as her husband Scott shared, she continued to participate in the world however she could. Guiding her older children through their lessons in math and handwriting (though she could barely see the writing on the worksheets.) Feeding her youngest oatmeal for breakfast. Leading her older daughter’s violin practice. Visiting with friends who had come to say goodbye. When she could no longer get out of bed, Scott moved their bed into the living room where she could still be fully part of family life.
There, one evening in early November, she died, surrounded by family and friends, having watched a couple of episodes of 30 Rock (her favorite show) and listened to Bach and Rich Mullins on the piano. A good day. A good life.
The invitation of today, Ash Wednesday, is to our lives like Beth lived hers: in the light of our mortality. To live them, as she did, as if death were not an abstract concept, (something far off, “down the road”) but something that could be close. To live them as though our time were limited and precious, because… it is. To trust, as the psalmist says, that there is wisdom to be found when we recognize the shortness of our days. And to make some intentional choices of our own, choices about how we’re going to spend our lives when the truth is, they’re not going to go on forever.
Our readings today, all of which contain a palpable sense of urgency, certainly give us some powerful clues about how we might spend our time. About what is most important in life. About what our relationship with others and God should look like.
The prophet Joel tells the people of God, who were facing impending judgment, not just to rend their garments in a public show of repentance, but more importantly, to rend their hearts. To do the genuine, inner work of repentance and reconciliation.
In our Gospel story from Matthew’s Gospel, from the Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has something similar to say. Don’t boast about your almsgiving, he tells people. Don’t turn your prayer into an act of self-promotion. Don’t flaunt your fasting. And don’t store up treasures for yourselves that you don’t need. Instead, store up treasures that will be valued by God, treasures that will draw you closer to God.
In other words, Joel and Jesus seem to be saying, let your lives have integrity. Let your relationships have integrity. Your relationship with God, and your relationships with your fellow human beings.
The apostle Paul couldn’t agree more. “Be reconciled to God,” he wrote to the Corinthian Christians. And, he goes on to say, don’t delay. Be reconciled now. “Now is the acceptable time. See, now is the day of salvation!” Not later, he says. It must be now. Because the truth is, you never know what tomorrow will bring. You never know when death will be coming for you.
These readings today all work together to remind us of something: that there is a reason we face our mortality today, on Ash Wednesday. And it isn’t just to be morbid or depressing. There’s another reason. Something far more profound. And that is, that facing our mortality makes us freer. Freer to spend our time on what matters most in life. Free to focus on the relationships that matter most. Freer to hold all the stuff in our lives that isn’t really that important a little more lightly or to let go of it all together. Freer to be ourselves, the people God has created us to be.
There’s an old saying from the monastic tradition that there is great freedom to be found in limitation. There is great freedom to be found in limitation. It’s a paradox, right? That we become freer when we limit ourselves, our choices and our options, or when recognize the limitations that are already imposed on us. Think of monks who choose to live in a monastery. Who choose to limit themselves to one place and one community, and from all the choices and distractions that those of us who live out in the world face. Believe it not, monks do this not because they want to be miserable! They do it because they want to be free. Because there is freedom to be found in limiting themselves. Freedom to focus their time and attention on what matters most.
It's this kind of freedom, the freedom found in limitation, that is also at the heart of today, Ash Wednesday. The invitation of today, and indeed of this whole season of Lent, isn’t meant as a self-serving invitation to sackcloth and ashes and fasting and other self-imposed forms of misery: it’s meant as an invitation to freedom. The freedom that is possible when we face our mortality. When we face the limitation placed on our lives by death. When we face the truth that life is short, and, as one prayer puts it, we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who journey the way with us. Rather than run from this reality or deny it, Ash Wednesday challenges us to lean into it—to face death squarely—trusting that when we do, we can be liberated to live however much or little time we have with greater intentionality, greater commitment, greater kindness, greater integrity, greater love.
In a few moments, we will receive ashes on our foreheads, and we will be reminded that we are dust and to dust we will return. This is the church’s not-so-subtle way of telling us that there is a deadline. That the clock is now ticking. That one day, death will come for each of us. That while we might be alive and even healthy today, one day, it will be otherwise.
So what difference will this knowledge make for us? What difference will it make for how we will live our lives? For how we will spend the time we’ve been given? What will our priorities be? What relationships do we need to tend? What people in our lives do we need to love better? What do we need to do to make sure things are right between us and God?
Now is the acceptable time to ask these questions. And now is the acceptable time to act on them. It is a matter of life and death.
—The Reverend Edmund I. Harris