Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
In the final lines of St. Francis of Assisi’s Laudes Creaturarum, after lauding God for Brothers Sun, Wind, Air, and Fire, and Sisters Moon, Water, and Earth, he turns to give thanks for a final member in his cosmic family. “Be praised, my Lord,” he sings, “for our Sister Death, whom we must all face.”
Death? A sister? How can this be? Is she not a blight upon the goodness of God’s creation? Is she not, as St. Paul has told us, the last enemy to be destroyed?1 Francis, unfortunately, gives no explanation for counting Death among his sisters. For Sister Moon he praises God because of her lovely beauty; for Sister Water, because she “is very useful to us, and humble and precious and pure;” for Sister Earth, because “she nourishes us and sustains us” with fruits, vegetables, and flowers that gladden the soul. These Sisters are among God’s humblest, noblest, most selfless of creatures. How is it, then, that Death should be considered with them?
As legend would have it, Francis’s most ecstatic experience of the divine came after contemplating at length upon the day that he would be no more. In the visual tradition, this episode from his life has become a rather standard motif. We often see the saint tucked deep in the hollow of a crag of rock, kneeling before a crude crucifix and a human skull as the heavens are opened to him, revealing Christ in glory. In Giovanni Baglione’s depiction of this event, the scene is treated with far more realism than many others have attempted. Francis, at the painting’s center, is a limp heap of brown sackcloth. His jaw is hinged open slightly as his head pitches back, his eyes showing only their whites. His left hand has fallen to the ground, still holding in place (but just barely) a page of Scripture, while his right hand loosely clutches a skull to his lap. He’d be completely supine, buckled at the knees on his back, if it weren’t for the wild wolf-haired angel supporting him from behind, enough to maybe catch a glimpse of the now-towering cross and thorny crown to which the messenger before him calmly gestures. There is little here to convey ecstasy. He looks not enraptured but freshly dead.
But for all the explicit realism of Baglione’s scene, it also takes quite seriously the mystical nature of its subject. It seems to imagine that in the moments of sweetness of Francis’s ecstasy, Francis really tasted death itself; that such a rapture was not realized through an aversion to death, but through a longing to know—and through an experience of—Christ’s death as his own. We may even suppose the passage he holds in place is one of Paul’s writing: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”2 Death, though uncreated, became to Francis in this moment a creature, a sacrament, through which the Love of Christ was shown. In other words, Francis’s ecstasy came not in lieu of death but because of it.
Today, many of us will receive a cross-shaped smudge of ash across our foreheads. Our bodies will shiver at the sensation, perhaps even more at the words spoken over us as they are smeared into the creases of brow: Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. We will be reminded with absolutely no mincing of words that we all must face Death. If Paul is correct (and I believe he is) that Death is our final enemy, we must not neglect the words of Christ Himself: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”3
The God of Creation did not create Death, the undoer of His good works. But she too, with them, shall pass away. By Love she is overcome. And when she is, when at last she has been made humble and precious and pure in the fire of God’s loving judgment, we shall see that as the sun illumines the moon so Life illumines Death. She will not be proud, she will bear no sting, she will have no victory—she will be only to us a sister, joining us, at last, to our Beloved.
Friends, let us in Love receive the mark of Death upon our skin, that in facing her we may all the more face Christ.
Amen.
1 Cor. 15:26 NRSVACE
Phil. 3:10-11
Matt. 5:44b-45
Connor, thank you. Such beauty and poignancy here, reflected in many layers, including in your writing and your reflections.