An incomplete homily for the Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020 (September 13). This would have been my first homily, but I abandoned it for being too dark for my inaugural. The story about my friend and the skull is a bit... much. Maybe I will find the right audience or work it in some place else.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091320.cfm
In the first reading, we hear Joshua Ben Sirach say, “remember death and decay, and cease from sin!” This is a repeated line in this unfamiliar Wisdom Book of the Hebrew Scriptures. Elsewhere Sirach writes, “In whatever you do, remember your last days and you will never sin” (7:36). Saint Benedict, the famous monk, was probably inspired by this line in his Rule. He poignantly wrote, “Keep death daily before your eyes” (4:47).
I know a man who lived as a monk in Rome for several years. One day several of his monastic brothers were digging in the monastery’s garden when they came upon a human skull. After much discussion and confusion, they determined that it probably belonged to a former bishop that wanted to be buried in the monastery but had been forbidden for some reason.
This next part of the story is going to sound very bizarre and perhaps macabre. The monk that I know asked for and was granted permission to bring the skull into his own cell. A monk’s cell is a very small room with just a bed and a desk. He put this bishop’s skull upon his desk where it stayed for some time.
When he went to sleep at night, the skull was the last thing he saw. When he woke up, it was the first thing. In this way, the brother literally kept death before his eyes.
Wrapped in silk. Kept the lights on all night.
Eventually became a kind of companion and even friend. I told my mom this story and at this point she said, “what like Alexa?”
NOTES:
American’s great fear of death. Inability to think about it and definitely not plan for it.
Present during the pandemic – the two poles of pretending it doesn’t exist and then being terrified when we or someone we know gets it. [Thinking I am not immune from]
Death keeps life in perspective.
God became Incarnate and shared even death with us. And through His own death, Christ has defeated death. Image at St. Meinrad of a skull beneath the feet of crucified cross.
Christ is the Lord of both the dead and the living. Where then death is your sting? Death is
swallowed up in victory (1 Cor 15)
The last enemy to be destroyed is death,
for he subjected everything under his feet.
As Paul writes in Romans:
For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.
For this is why Christ died and came to life,
that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
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