death

Already and Not Yet

On Palm Sunday 2021, I sank into a pew at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ft. Worth, Texas, my heart heavy with grief. The day before, I had had breakfast with a former student, James. He revealed that his father—a successful businessman, evangelical Christian, and well-known philanthropist—had committed suicide in July 2020. 

The news of yet another suicide left me feeling despondent. On Palm Sunday, I did not feel God's love. Instead, I was asking God how he could let so many tragedies happen. My thoughts and emotions left me unable to pray. As I struggled to listen attentively to the long Palm Sunday readings of the passion of Jesus, I began to picture the agony in the garden, where Jesus called out to his father to take this suffering from him, if he willed it.

Spurred by Jesus’s anguished petitions, I cried out in my heart, “Why Lord, do you let these things happen? How much more suffering must this world endure? When, Lord, are you coming again?”

And in my heart I heard, “I’m already right here with you.”

I stared at the crucifix—the ultimate sign of love—hanging behind the altar. Then I looked one by one at the stations of the cross. Word and image united to move my heart to remember that Jesus is with us in our pain. He suffered so we can be redeemed.

But somehow that didn’t feel satisfying. I thought, “That’s not good enough!”

Then I heard, “You need to be my hands and my feet to the suffering.”

My heart of stone melted. I realized that I can’t walk into Mass demanding that God fix my problems the way I see fit. I walk into Mass to receive his love, so that I can respond with faith to whatever problems may come my way. Liturgy isn’t a magical rite that gives us godlike power to manipulate the world with a foolproof plan of action. Liturgy is an act of worship that reminds us we are creatures who depend on a loving God. Liturgy speaks to our broken hearts, to our grief, anger, and confusion, and brings us into dialogue with Jesus.

Recently, while teaching Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, I was reminded that because of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, the chasm between heaven and earth has been broken open. The liturgy is a kind of work through which God makes his dwelling in the world. The liturgy is one powerful way to see our earthly dramas and tragedies as part of a larger narrative, one that reminds us God has made a covenant of love with us. Participation in the liturgy can help us heal our wounds.

As Benedict XVI writes, “creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man . . . creation, history and worship are in a relationship of reciprocity.” We live in an earthly reality, but we are also journeying toward our final fulfillment, which has already been inaugurated by the coming of Christ. The liturgy fulfills our desires to experience God here and now, while also preparing us for greater communion with God to come. Worship anticipates the completion of creation.

The liturgy is therefore not an escape from reality, but an anticipation of what we were created to become—and therefore a participation in a deeper reality. Liturgy becomes a symbol of all of life, a life we live, as Benedict said, “already and not yet.”

The liturgy, Benedict XVI writes, represents the drama of God's departure and his return, what he calls “a kind of turning around of exitus and reditus.” Through the liturgy I participated in on Palm Sunday, I was reminded that being near suffering is an invitation to journey in this circle of exitus and reditus. Liturgy is an embodied and mysterious reminder of the covenant of love to which God calls us. When the news cycle and our personal lives are pulling us toward acts of despair, the liturgy can renew our hope in God’s promises. Liturgy can strengthen our love so we can be the hands and feet to wounded friends and neighbors in this wounded nation.

We who are dedicated to a robust civil society must ask ourselves: What response do we have for the many thousands of those who struggling with mental illness and fear during COVID? How we can respond to the tragedy of suicide with hope for those who feel hopeless?

One response: As we continue to address COVID risks and begin to reopen our schools and public institutions, we must do all we can to bring the faithful back to liturgy in person, where anguished hearts can renew their covenant with a God whose promises are already, and also not yet, coming true.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of Scala Foundation. This article was originally published at First Things,

Death Is a Veil — and Love Is Eternal

About halfway through a two-and-a-half-hour liturgy at St. Vartan’s Armenian Orthodox Cathedral on April 25, 2021, a giant curtain closed between the congregation and the altar. Staring at the cross embroidered on the curtain, my heart cried out, “Death is a veil!”

In those same pews a few years earlier, I had sat with John Aroutiounian, a student I worked with while I was on faculty at Yale. John wanted to introduce me to his Armenian Orthodox heritage through the liturgy. Just a few years later, on May 3, 2019, days after he turned 26, my heart was torn apart when John died of cancer. Around 11 months later, on March 31, 2020, I collapsed in tears when I heard John’s father Aris died of COVID-19.

Because of COVID, John’s family had to cancel plans to remember John on the first anniversary of his death. There was no public funeral for Aris in 2020. Thankfully, on April 26, around 10 family members and I visited the graves of John and Aris to pray for them. Bishop Daniel Findikyan, Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church in America, led us in prayer. We burned incense, laid flowers on the grave, hugged each other and cried. Then, back at the home of Rouzan Karabakhtsian, Aris’s wife and John’s mother, we shared a banquet of Armenian food as we shared stories of John and Aris.

The following day, people of various faith traditions, and some people who claim no particular faith tradition, gathered at St. Vartan’s to remember John and Aris. At the Sunday morning liturgy, I was sitting in between Rouzan and Maria, Aris’s sister and John’s aunt. I did not understand a single word in the liturgy except “Christos.” But because of my own Catholic heritage, and because I recently taught Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, I knew that each and every aspect of the liturgy aims to make present the mysteries of incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The closing of the curtain sparked in my heart the memory of the suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday. Although death is painful, the liturgy continues, reminding us that our mortality is not the end of the story. Death is a veil because it is a window to a deeper reality, one where, because of the resurrection, our love for others can be eternal. The desire for our human love to be eternal is a sign, a reflection, of the one eternal love, the whole that can unite us, in God, to our departed loved ones.

St. Paul wrote, “Neither death, nor life … nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Sacred liturgy and sacred art give us a glimpse of the eternal reality that is already present, yet incomplete, in this life.

As the curtain receded at St. Vartan’s and the liturgy continued, I gazed up at the image of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, with the Christ Child on her lap. My grief over John and Aris deepened my desire for that eternal love reaching out to me from that icon.

“Death is a veil,” I thought. “Love is eternal.”

Contemplatively reading St. Bonaventure’s classic Mind’s Journey to God as I visited John several times close to this death in 2019 helped me to recognize more clearly that his bodily death was not the end. As St. Bonaventure wrote in 1259, “This actual retention on the part of memory of the things of time, past, present and future, reveals in it a reflection of eternity, which is a continuous present that transcends the passage of time.”

When death separates us from loved ones, our longing for reuniting with them is an internal light that pierces the veil of death. Grief becomes a desire to sharpen our memory. Liturgy — with its words, images, gestures, vestments and incense — engages our senses and shapes our memory, turning our mind to contemplate God and his works.

“Through the operations of memory, then,” Bonaventure wrote, “we are led to see that the human mind is an image of God, an image so present to Him and to which he is so intimate that it actually touches him, is potentially capable of holding him, and in turn may become a partaker in him.”

For all of us who have lost loved ones, the present feels incomplete without them. Family and friends of John and Aris gathered to remember them through the liturgy, precisely because our communion with God is what enables us to grasp that their life is not over. In God and through what is called the communion of saints, it is possible for John and Aris to be with us. Later that same day, we also celebrated a Catholic Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, where John’s funeral service had been held. The absence of John and Aris — or rather their mysterious, continual presence in our personal memories and in the liturgies of the East and the West — united the hearts of those in the pews who did not know each other before the deaths of John and his father.

Over a festive meal at a restaurant, as several of us shared our favorite memories of John and his father, it felt like we were completing a puzzle, one that will never quite be complete. The more we each share of our memories of John and Aris, the more beautiful every single piece of that puzzle becomes.

With around two years to reflect on my final conversations with John, I have realized that John was so beloved because he knew how to both plan a grand evening of fun and how to be with people as they suffered. As he neared his death, he suffered physically, psychologically and even spiritually. But he never gave up his faith and hope in God.

By connecting me to others who also loved John and Aris, my grief for them paradoxically makes me feel more complete. Our shared sense of missing John and Aris has allowed us to connect deeply over that shared love, expanding my circle of love to people whom I have only met two or three times. After so much suffering and isolation, that human bond formed through tears, stories, hugging, and also singing, eating, and laughing together, felt so authentic. In allowing my deep grief to rise to the surface, I felt my painful memories were healed.

As I drove home, I gazed out at the New York City skyline, savoring memories of walking through Manhattan with John. The blue sky was clear; my heart longed to capture the sun’s radiance. When I got home to Princeton around 8:30 pm, I went to Marquand Park near my house to pray the Rosary. 

In the quiet stillness of a spring dusk in a park where I have walked hundreds of times, I felt a presence, as is someone were walking with me under the moonlight. I stared at the full moon and felt as if John was shouting, “Margarita, I’m here! I’m right here!”

Smiling, breathing slowly, I stared intently at the trees. Suddenly the beauty of their trunks, branches and leaves exhilarated me. Staring up at the moon, sometimes partially obscured by branches, nature was speaking to me, telling me that I need to trust that God’s light is guiding me even if his presence is sometimes veiled. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4).

Back at home, a feeling of lightness and ease came over me. I laid down in bed, clutching a shiny pink rosary my niece Camille brought me from Rome. My mind was not analyzing, predicting, or controlling things, but contemplating. I savored the whole weekend — grieving, rejoicing, remembering, loving, looking, listening, hugging and crying. Our celebrations brought me to a place of mental rest that is an anticipation of the fullness of time to come, a fullness that we can perceive in our hearts already. The awareness of my inability to stay in that place of comfort right now is also an anticipation of the fullness of reality to come.

Just as there is no liturgy without remembering the death of Jesus on the cross, perhaps there is no true joy without some suffering. When I sobbed at John’s hospital bedside saying goodbye to him, I never dreamed that my grief would deepen my ability to rejoice in ordinary things: a tree, the moonlight, or the clear sky. I love the liturgy more than ever because it engages all of my senses, lifts my mind to God, and brings John close to me.

Suffering and death remain a mystery to me. We do not know what may happen next in this life, but that uncertainty need not be met with fear. Knowing that life is unpredictable, and knowing that death is a veil, has taught me to express more naturally the deepest longing we all have: to give and receive love.

Our desire for love is fulfilled partially in relationships and community. But humans are mortal. Only communion with God can vanquish our fear and fulfill our desire for love. As Bonaventure wrote, “happiness, however, is possible only by the possession of the highest and ultimate end. It follows that nothing that is really desired by man except it be the Supreme Good, either as an installment of it as leading to it or else as bearing some resemblance to it.”

Death is a veil, a sign of a deeper reality of eternal life in God. Likewise, our human loves, our memory, our intellect and our will point us to God. “Memory,” Bonaventure said, “is a reflection of his eternity, intellect … postulates his truth, and the power of choice … leads to him as the Supreme Good.”

The beautiful things we perceive in nature — the sun, the moon, the trees — the desires of our hearts, and even our fear of mortality and grief for loved ones — are windows to the eternal love of God.

This article was originally published at National Catholic Register.