Practicing Dying in Lent

At the end of every yoga class we practice dying. Our teacher tells us that the corpse pose, or shavasana, is the most difficult of all yoga postures to master, but for those of us whose legs and arms are trembling from an hour’s exertion in warrior pose, downward-facing dog and pigeon, the prospect of relaxing horizontally on one’s yoga mat brings both relief and the obvious question, “How hard can it be?”

Fascinated, I reported to my husband last week, “At the conclusion of every yoga class we practice dying.” “That’s interesting,” he said, trying to share my enthusiasm. “It’s kind of like Lent,” I continued, “except it’s a physical practice, not so much a spiritual one. Lent is when we’re supposed to practice dying, right?”

When I was young and my best friend died of cancer, my pastor told me, “You’ve been given a terrible gift at so young an age, Tuula. A terrible gift.” That two-word phrase, “terrible gift,” functions as a parable for me. New Testament scholar Brandon Scott reminds us that the Greek word parabole can mean to “throw beside.” Most typically a parable throws something beside something else—unexpectedly.

Take the kingdom of God being like a woman, for example. That must have been a real shock to listeners of Jesus. The kingdom of heaven is like a woman? No way. Women are property. Women are impure. The kingdom of God is like a woman? Impossible. Ridiculous. Insulting. 

But this is what a parable does. A parable leaves one feeling emotionally and theologically breathless and disoriented—like “terrible” and “gift.” They aren’t ordinarily thrown down beside each other. But that’s what Lent does. It throws life down with death, and death with life. We practice dying. We learn living.

Many of us have been given the terrible gift of walking alongside those we love who are dying. When my grandmother’s dying began she’d call from her bed, “Girls!” My sister and I would come running. “What, grandma?” “You’ve got to do something about all these children playing under my bed. Give them some lunch, and take them out to play.”

Lent gives us 40 days to practice dying. Paradoxically, Lent’s terrible, life-giving wisdom is simple: each of us dies the way we have lived. I don’t mean that the easiness or difficulty of our dying is determined by our living. Physically speaking, my grandmother’s death was a difficult one. But in her death, my grandmother, who spent her life caring for children, was herself cared for by children. In the last days of her life, grandma talked about “the most darling little boy” who was holding her hand.

As a Chaplain Intern in New York, I was assigned as a reader for a dying Roman Catholic sister Eileen. She spent her last days exactly as she had lived her best ones: with a hunger for God, poetry, and music. She wanted to hear Emily Dickinson’s poems read aloud. She was restless for a note-by-note explanation of Bach’s Saint John Passion so that she might, as she said, “know exactly what Bach is doing right here.”

Lent asks us how we are living our lives, and reminds us that we die the way we live. Lent is the time not for giving up something of little consequence, but for identifying what is most essential in our lives, what it is that we are living for. As Thomas Merton put it, “Ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for” (My Argument with the Gestapo). That is Lent’s terrible gift: an examination of our living.

Recently, in a conversation with a woman whose faith was great, I couldn’t help asking, “What do you think happens when we die?” Without a pause she said, “I think Jesus sends someone to comfort us. Someone particularly special to us that only Jesus would know about.
Wishing desperately to believe such a thing, but unable to get my mind wrapped around it, my mind’s eye went to the final weeks of grandma’s dying and to that darling little boy who held her hand - the one we never saw, but whom we suspect of being the source of her smile every once in a while, even long after she’d lost consciousness.

We die the way we lived. Of course grandma died with a little boy’s hand holding hers and Sister Eileen with Bach’s Saint John’s Passion in her hands. Lent is a perfect time to spend 40 days becoming clear about the lives we are living, and a great time to practice dying so we that can live.

- Pastor Tuula Van Gaasbeek