Learning how to die
How a rule of life is a compost heap for faith
“In my end is my beginning.”
-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker
I once had an empty coffin brought into a church service. It wasn’t for a funeral. I thought it was a pretty brilliant visual for the sermon I was preaching from Ecclesiastes, something to bring home the point where my words may have fallen short.
The presence of an empty casket left many uncomfortable. That gleaming wooden box an unwelcome part of Sunday morning. People were upset. Someone walked out.
Death offends us when it shows up. In turn, we’ve become expert evaders (read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death for a detailed analysis). Move all the cemeteries out of sight. Turn death into entertainment. Don’t tell me how my chicken dinner arrived on my plate. Let’s all agree to never really deal with it.
To consider learning how to die, then, seems absurd in our death denying world - which is strange given the devastatingly strong statistics around every one of us dying. The fear of death grips us, making death taboo, the great unmentionable, and the source of profound anxiety.
Yet, as theologian Karl Barth reminds, it’s only where there are graves is there resurrection. On the far side of the cross, the call of Jesus to lose our lives is the farthest thing from a funeral. On this side of the resurrection is joy and freedom from the fear. Only those who have died to themselves are set free to fully live, released from the grip of deforming anxiety — because what power does a tomb have if you’ve risen with Christ? Far from grave cheerlessness, it is only those who have learned how to die who can truly laugh and fully live.
So in a world desperate to shield ourselves from death, where do we go to learn how to die? In prior generations, meditation on death (memento mori) was used as spiritual formation. If Jesus meant “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9), then we better find ways to practice dying to ourselves.
A rule of life is remedial spiritual formation, a gift for death-evaders and people unpracticed in dying to our selves. It invites us into small acts of de-centering the secret, sacred self. We practice dying to live into the life that lies on the other side of resurrection.
As I’ve studied a rule of life in the Christian tradition, I’ve found there are three core elements that correspond to three central parts of what it means to be human. There are rhythms and routines, regular practices involving our bodies. A rule always includes intentional relationships, engaging the necessary social dimension of human life. And then there are renunciations, the strategic ‘no’s’ we say in order to offer our glad ‘yes’ to Jesus.
Renunciations are the small ways people practice and learn how to die to ourselves. In this relinquishment, the releasing of life on our terms, we then open ourselves to resurrection life.
One of the wonderfully odd images for the dying-rising rhythm at the heart of following Jesus and practiced in a rule of life is a compost pile. A rule of life, like a compost pile, is a place for things to die. A place where good dying happens, where followers of Jesus learn to live life not on their own terms.
A compost pile doesn’t look like much; it is a rotting heap of garbage. All the scraps and cast-offs of life - vegetable peelings, apple cores, used tea bags, leftover coffee grounds, empty egg shells, dead flowers and dry leaves - all there dying and decomposing.
Yet it teems with life. I’m told one teaspoon of compost contains more living organisms than there are humans on the planet. Billions of microbes actively break down the rejects of life. All sorts of dying is going on transforming this death into the conditions for life. With enough time, the right temperature, just enough moisture and oxygen, on the other side of that rotting grave of scraps, a transformation happens. The richest of soil grows, gardeners black gold ready for new life to grow.
Guided by a rule of life, followers of Jesus willingly renounce certain parts of living many would consider normal and necessary - food, technology, the demands of work, the comforts of others. These little deaths to the reign of self slowly prepare the conditions in our lives for the seeds of God’s Kingdom to take root and grow.
In the renunciations of a rule of life there is good dying going on. All the hollowed and empty bits of our day and age that offer no life, that need to die, get tossed onto the pile. Attitudes of a soured heart, shells of church structures that no longer bring life, anxieties far from God’s Kingdom, curdled desires, clippings of consumerism, addictions to digital technologies, the empty promises of materialism, and so much more - we turn from them. Renounce them, saying no in order so that Christ and his way might take root and grow.
The renunciations embedded in the practices of the rule of life community I lead (the Habitus Community) don’t look like much: a one-hour rest each day from screens and devices, a weekly fast, calling a 24-hour halt to work once-a-week, and 30 minutes of weekly quiet and silence. When you consider the converting sway of prevailing culture, these seem tiny. Yet under the unseen work of these microbial renunciations, something of God’s kingdom grows.
“Death is Christ’s minister,” said Scottish minister Alexander MacLaren. Renunciation is the curriculum of resurrection.
Learn how to die so that you might rise with the glory and authority of our risen King Jesus, and serve God’s new creation in every broken corner of this world.
I love this post, Phil. I also love shovelling compost from my bins into the garden every spring. Looking at some old files today, I found a copy of John Updyke’s Poem “Ode to Rot”. It was shared during a staff devotional in 1985! A number of the colleagues of that time have passed on. When you’ve lived three quarters of a century you ________ .