Dying, As A Franciscan: Approaching Our Transistus to Eternal Life, Accompanying Others on the Way to Theirs

She Cared for her Sick Sisters …

sHe CareD FOr Her siCk sisters … katHleen mCCarrOn, O.s.F. I thought I’d begin this talk with another poem by David Whyte. The poem is entitled The Faces at Braga. In monastery darkness by the light of one flashlight the old shrine room waits in silence While above the door we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding , “Will you step through?” And the old monk leads us, bent back nudging blackness prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow, eyes blinking in the pungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation, a hundred faces carved above, eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light. Such love in solid wood! Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past they have been neglected, but through smoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes, their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. Carved in devotion their eyes have softened through age until their mouths curve through delight of the carvers hand. If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver’s hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, kathleeN MccarroN 52 we would smile, too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failing we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fight our eyes are hooded with grief and our mouths are dry with pain. If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver’s hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the sea where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver’s hands.1 I chose this poem by David Whyte because I believe that it invites us into a space which is very Franciscan as we consider caring for our own. It invites us to allow the hand of the invisible carver to bring the deep grains of love to the surface; thus, it implies, there is a deep love within each of us waiting to be unleashed. Even in those among us who are a little more difficult to love. We are also invited to consider how the flaws in the wood led the carver’s searching chisel to the very core. Thus, we are called to acknowledge our own flaws and place them in the hands of the carver. I would like to suggest that in order to be with those of our own who are suffering and/or dying, we need to consider our own dying and rising that occurs in our lives each day. I can’t be with anyone until I have taken stock of myself. Each of us has had multiple experiences of dying and rising throughout our lives. These experiences may have been in relationships, in our community living, with authority figures, with the church, within our families. Perhaps it was a difficult diagnosis . Perhaps it was even looking for a ministry and not being able to find one. Perhaps it was being terminated from a position. Whatever the experience it transforms us, and we emerge as it were just a little different from when we entered the process. It is a letting go; it is ac1 David Whyte, The Faces at Braga (Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press, 1990), 2527 . sHe Cared For Her siCk sisTers 53 knowledging our powerlessness and a willingness to be transformed, trusting the spirit within you and growing in an awareness of where God is leading. Thus, our own experience of dying and rising makes us more compassionate towards our own. I’d like to quote Ilia Delio here to fully illustrate this point from her book, Clare of Assisi, A Heart Full of Love, and I quote, Clare had a real sense that death...