◊ Listening to Boredom (continued)
“When death comes to find you, may it find you ALIVE.” -~ African Proverb
The third fear associated with unexcavated boredom is the fear of one’s mortality. Mortality understood not as some abstract dimension of existence but specifically as the fear of one’s own dying and death. The veiled anxiety of one’s own earthly demise, the secret panic that floods us when we sense but refuse to acknowledge the reality of our own finitude that from the dawn of our existence has slowly risen like an unsubstantiated rumor struggling to make its unwanted presence known. If and when it does finally get our attention, it often does so dramatically, tragically, or belatedly. We remember how Danny Aiello’s Johnny replies to Olympia Dukakis’ Rose in the movie Moonstruck when asked why married men have affairs, “I don’t know, maybe because he fears death.”
Unmasking the charade of boredom almost always involves confronting the certainty of one’s death. Within the Christian and, in particular, monastic tradition there long has been the spiritual practice called memento mori, freely translated, “remember you will die.” Some monasteries were known to keep a bleached-white skull in a visible place where all the monks could see it as a daily reminder of their mortal prospects. A theology professor of mine once divulged that he had built himself the coffin he would one day be buried in. I recall that he kept it in a large walk-in closet where it served for the time being as a bureau for shirts and sweaters. His intention was neither to be morbid nor to encourage anxious preoccupation with death, but rather to wake himself daily to the contingent nature of his existence and to the gratuitousness of life itself. For him, each morning was a reminder: “I am going to die. ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.’ Therefore, live!” Each new dawn posed him not just the question, “What should I wear today?” but more importantly, “How am I to live today so that I am wide awake to the sacredness of my being and the fullness of my life? What must I do to celebrate “the sacrament of the present moment”? What truth do I seek to embody today that is commensurate with the Holy Breath that animates me? How am I to live today that I might be an enlivening presence for others? How do I live gratefully, as one indebted not entitled?
Orthodox Christian author and peace activist Jim Forest recalls an incident about which his young friend Mel Hollander told him. Daniel Berrigan, the poet-priest and jester-prophet, was teaching a class on pastoral care of the dying. Mel signed up for the class and was himself dying of cancer. Although his classmates and teacher were unaware of his terminal condition, his poor physical health was quite evident. Forest writes: “During the period of silence with which Dan started each class, his eye fell on Mel and stayed there. At last Dan broke the quiet with a question to Mel, ‘What’s the matter?’ Mel said, ‘I’m dying.’ Dan, without batting an eye, replied, ‘That must be very exciting.’” Forest continues: “Mel told me afterward that no medicine he was taking, no book he had read had done so much good for him as those five words. They were a kind of lightning flash. In the light of that flash was the resurrection of Jesus, as real as the streets of New York. Mel knew at once that he was in the midst of the most remarkable experience of his life. Nose to nose with death, he had never felt more alive.”
PRACTICE:
•Take some time the next two weeks to find an “object” (something you now own or something you find in nature or a poem like Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” or something you see in a shop) and put this symbol where you will see it every day. Like the monk’s bleached skull, let it be a living reminder to you that time is of the essence ~ SO LIVE!