By Father Steven Kostoff
In the Orthodox Prayer Book under the heading “Before Sleep,” we find “A Prayer of Saint John of Damascus, said pointing at the bed.” This particular prayer begins, “O Master Who lovest mankind, is this bed to be my coffin? Or wilt Thou enlighten my wretched soul with another day?”
As Saint John was a monk, we could, of course, dismiss or ignore such a prayer as “monastic excess,” or even as a morbid and medieval fixation on death. (It seems that whenever our contemporary ears encounter anything strange, unfamiliar or jarring from the past, the label of “medieval” allows us to disengage from any thoughtful consideration of what is being said). If we are sleepy, but essentially healthy, as we prepare for bed on any given evening, then it seems quite unlikely—thank God!—that our bed will serve as our coffin as we prepare to enter into it. The inevitable seems safely postponed for the moment, and we feel confident that we will rise with the sun the following morning. And yet, a moment of serious reflection on our common destiny—that great equalizer that we call death—should alert those who are spiritually vigilant that such a prayer cannot simply be dismissed as either monastic or morbid. Understood in the overall context of how and for what we may pray before sleep according to the Prayer Book and our personal prayers, it is an open-eyed—and hence realistic—reminder that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” [Genesis 3:19].
This theme stands out in the short parable of the “rich fool,” as found uniquely in Luke 12:16-21. The parable is brief, but devastating. The foolish landowner is far-reaching in his plans for the future. He will tear down his old barns, now inadequate to store his abundant crops, and build “larger ones.” Anticipating the enjoyment of a life of ease based upon his accumulated wealth, he says, “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry’” [Luke 12:19].
However alluring, this was not to be, for the very next thing we hear in this parable are these frightening words: “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God’” [Luke 12:20-21].
Such planning is mere foolishness in the eyes of God. (As Tevye the dairyman said, “The more man plans, the harder God laughs”). The brevity of life and the uncertainty of our end has—although containing a timeless and universal truth, but perhaps because of sheer repetition—often been reduced to the level of a pious cliché or religious platitude. For that reason, spiritual vigilance is essential. In the Church’s spiritual tradition, we are exhorted to cultivate the “remembrance of death.” And yet our highly secularized society convinces us to practice the “forgetfulness of death.” Which is more realistic? Or true to life? Try as we might, we cannot forget death, of course. So, as living human beings “go for it” in terms of life in this world, the unwanted “remembrance of death” is there to trouble the mind. In his book, God With Us, Father John Breck, in a chapter entitled “The Thought of Death,” captures this underlying and unresolved tension: “A great many people actually do chastise their soul with the thought of death. They suffer acute anxiety at the thought that their life will come to an end, that they will die and be buried in the earth. They fear death because of the unknown. What lies beyond the threshold behind that veil? Heaven? Hell? Nothing? The dread of death, which provokes questions like this, can, with tragic irony, push a person over the brink and into suicide” [page 101].
~Website of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA): https://oca.org/reflections/fr.-steven-kostoff/the-remembrance-of-death.
