“Modeling their lives on his purity, they will be secure in the hope of his resurrection and of enjoying with him the glory promised in heaven. Our Lord himself said so in the gospel: Whoever follows me will not perish, but will pass from death to life.” - from an Easter homily by an ancient author in the Office of Readings for Wednesday within the Octave of Easter, The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite, Catholic Book Publishing Co., New York 1976.

Many essayists and pundits over the past year have likened life during the pandemic to living the life of cloistered monks. The analogy has not been lost on the eight monks currently in residence at Portsmouth Abbey, young and old alike, (and the few men in between). It’s doubtful, though, that any layperson (oblates excepted) actually thinking of himself or herself as a cloistered/bubbled religious over the past months would be familiar with our operator’s manual, The Rule of St. Benedict. Chapter Four of the roughly 1500-year-old book is titled, “The Tools for Good Works” or, in a different translation, “What Are the Instruments of Good Works.” The monk is exhorted to, “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.” An alternative translation puts it more succinctly by strongly suggesting that the monk, “keep death daily before one’s eyes.”

You may find it oddly morbid to come across such an idea about death while browsing a chapter on instruments or tools for good work, thinking perhaps that you might be about to gain some insight into medieval utensils for gardening, carpentry or masonry. But St. Benedict’s admonition to keep death before our eyes has been a relatively easy task for everyone since Easter 2020, whether we like it or not. The almost daily flow of images of mass burials, of corpses stacked in refrigerated trucks parked behind overflowing morgues, and of funeral parlors devoid of mourners but filled with the mourned, has been seared into our collective consciousness.

The news feeds and photos in the media of the deceased from around the world have blurred the line between first-world countries and third-world cultures. Each photo caption must be read in order to determine on which continent, in which country, in which state or province, or in which county or parish the coffins are stacked. They all start to look the same. Every front-page photo becomes a memento mori for us, a constant reminder to “remember you must die.” Death always has been, and will continue to be, the common denominator of humankind. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once wrote that, “One day we will wake up and discover we are family.” The sooner that day arrives, the better off we’ll be.

Not all the recent deaths which have touched us in the wider Abbey community have been Covid-related. Our dear Fr. Julian Stead died at age 94 on Dec. 23. We marked and mourned his death one day, and two days later we celebrated a birth, that of Jesus on Christmas. Shortly thereafter, a 16-year-old girl named Mia, the first cousin of one of our Form IV young men, also 16, passed away. The young man had been baptized by Fr. Julian which meant he lost two people, just weeks apart, with whom he had been very close.

Kids used to be ‘protected’ from death in the old days, but not in my family. My maternal grandmother died when I was 5, just before Christmas 1957. I woke up to the sound of women’s voices coming from downstairs. I saw the coat tree on the landing at the bottom of the stairs piled with winter coats. As I slowly made my way to the living room, I found my mother crying on the davenport surrounded by her sister, cousins and aunts, making phone calls to the long-distance relatives. I was kept home from school that day. This was my introduction to death.

I was taken to Gram’s wake in a funeral parlor a few days later. It lasted two days, but I did not attend the funeral on the third. We had no towering Christmas tree that year on Maple Street, just a small unlighted tree that sat atop the black-and-white television. Several years later I attended the wake of a neighbor lady on my paper route whose grown son was a teacher in our school. In a tradition that has gone out of fashion, she was ‘waked’ in her own house, open casket and all.

Most of these seemingly random thoughts occurred, as they often do for me, in church. As the season of Lent inched closer to Holy Week, and Holy Week to the Sacred Triduum, there was adequate quiet time to reflect on the impending annual commemoration of the brutal death of Jesus Christ on Good Friday. Last year at this time we had no students on campus and the church was literally closed to everyone except the monks.

Inside the church and monastery, it is easy to “keep death daily before one’s eyes” given the many crucifixes and other images on devotional display. The altars, too, we must remember, contain relics and bones of saints and martyrs, and remind us that they are repositories much like the catacombs in Rome and elsewhere. Tradition holds that early Christian liturgies were celebrated there. Throughout Europe it is common to see incorrupt bodies of saints encased in glass beneath church altars. It is traditional in some places to display a full-size image of the crucified Christ, either sculptural or in a painting, in a cave-like tomb of sorts on Holy Saturday.

Some churches present a replica of the empty tomb at the Easter Vigil. I have witnessed this inside a school in Santiago, Chile, and outside a monastery in Zimbabwe, where we used real rocks and boulders to build a tomb. And I helped supervise the restoration of a hundred-year papier-mache tomb by a St. Louis Priory student as his Eagle Scout project for his Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Despite this, I came across a harsh instruction in a book I was reading early in Holy Week in preparation for the Triduum. It warned: “Constructing empty tombs with fake stones cheapens the Easter mystery and adds unnecessary clutter to the sanctuary.” I disagree but take it for what it’s worth.

Despite the vaccinations, it seems as if face masks will be with us for some time. In fact, masks were among those random thoughts which came to me during Holy Week. Not only the ubiquitous Covid masks, but death masks, carnival masks, Halloween masks, welding masks and ether masks. (As a boy, my favorite death mask was Abraham Lincoln’s until I learned that it was really a life mask. Then it became my favorite life mask.)

As for the ether mask, I remember it well. The woman, a nurse in a white nun’s habit, pressed the clear mask (plastic? rubber?) over my nose and mouth and told me to count backwards from 100. Being then about 4, I’m not sure I had yet learned the concept of what “100” meant. I was in the children’s ward of St. Joseph’s Hospital and was about to have my tonsils removed. Best medical practice no longer recommends routine tonsillectomies on young children. It wasn’t until many decades later that I learned that an anesthesiologist is trained to take a person to the brink of death in order for the surgeon to properly do his job. Ether is no longer used in medical practice, having been abandoned shortly after I received it. It had been in use for about 100 years after its introduction in 1846 in Boston.

A further note: We appreciate the many positive comments we have received about The Current and the content in it. Due to the restrictions on the dissemination of paper goods in the church, we print only a very limited number of copies which are mailed to oblates who have no access to computers or internet at this time. As for restarting our Days of Recollection, which no one misses more than me, we are still not allowed to invite groups on campus, unlike other facilities or retreat centers. Information will be sent once the restrictions in the school are lifted.