ASLEEP IN THE LORD

...In addition to the Jesuit obituaries we learned that relatives of community members had died through the request, read at supper, to "pray for the repose of the soul of the-(father, mother, etc...

...Death began to lose its mystic aura and to take on a disturbing familiarity...

...Of course, I seldom knew personally all the men whose deaths accumulated so quickly, but I still had a sense of loss...

...At funerals I fretted less about the bleakness of the liturgy and brooded instead over the finality of death...

...But what was more conceivable than eternal death...

...The bodies all had that shrunken, shriveled look of men who had been a long time dying...

...Sometimes it was a surprise, as when they found a vigorous old priest dead in his room, killed by a stroke as he sat peeling an orange...

...In other words, a soul...

...Andrew's was filling up, so all the houses in the province buried their dead here...

...It had no parts to break down into, and hence was indestructible- unless God should choose to annihilate it...

...The last act is bloody, however fine all the rest of the play may be...

...We would all rise in our pews, poised to file out for morning meditation, when the bells would fling us to our knees...

...Now I had joined an immense, vulnerable family, full of old men...

...I used to seize the coffin stand immediately after the recessional and wheel it to the vestibule of the church, to collect a grudging 250 or 500 ransom from the pallbearers...

...I meditated on the great consoling lines of the New Testament: ". . . unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone...

...All deaths of members of the New York and Buffalo provinces, numbering at that time around 1,600 men, were reported during reading at table...

...Dying was much harder than I had once thought...

...Death came to St...

...The man himself was never named, since if he had not yet left for the funeral, he might be eating in the refectory with us...

...In most activities you could both do something and watch yourself doing it, but you could not simultaneously know something and know that you were knowing it...

...Save them from the lion's jaws...

...After the final absolution the choir sang the wistful hymn, "In paradi-sum," which like all prayers for the dead made me wonder: the dead man was already light years away from us...

...In the philosophate I walked many times in black coat and biretta behind funeral processions to our hillside cemetery...

...Such letters, assuming mine were typical, were delivered by the dozen to the seminarian, who passed them on to his family...

...As long as the belt or rope held out, I would be safe...

...neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away...

...But just as your mother put on Christ's death in her baptism, so now by dying she shares in Christ's resurrection, etc...

...Otherwise all the petty, banal, boring, stupid souls of the righteous would be immortalized...

...Now for the first time we saw the family of the deceased, ordinarily just a handful, their suits and dresses standing out from the ranks of black soutanes...

...Yet here we were, wishing him well, like a bon voyage party for someone who has reached his destination long ago...

...Wakes and funerals in the seminary were horrible...

...Besides, I had no choice...

...The priest's delusion reminded me of one of my childhood fancies...

...Observing how the villains in all the Westerns staggered when they were shot and lunged for something to hold onto, only to fall down dead, I concluded that you could not die till you had slumped on the ground...

...Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay...

...Sooner or later a note would go up on the bulletin board with the exact time of death and other details...

...read in Woodstock Letters, a private Jesuit magazine, about an old priest whose head was turned by reading these notices...

...My ideas were a muddle, but I had the will to believe, and I believed...

...Everyone dispersed, except for the work crew that stayed behind with Brother Zugan, the short, burly gravedigger, to shovel in the dirt...

...In my Prince Myshkin phase death seemed easy...

...All this was new to me...

...It was a brief, starkly cold ceremony, with no one communicating, since we had already gone to mass...

...I chewed on this on the way back to the house...

...I would not fall like a leaf onto the Ground of Being...

...Like an animal facing a predator, he thought he could escape if he stayed perfectly still...

...Their professional slickness scarcely concealed a monumental indifference that seemed to mock the dead...

...Passing the fathers' bulletin board on the second floor I always checked to see if there were any of the familiar black-bordered postcards from the provincial's office there...

...I recall the rasping, phlegmy voice of the lector filling the chapel with the plaintive verses of the tenth chapter of Job...

...I was sorry to hear about the death of your mother...

...let them not be engulfed in Tartarus nor swallowed up in darkness...

...If a man died during the night, the De Profundis would not be rung until after Angelus, at 6 A.M...

...I read Unamuno and Pascal...

...And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes...

...Wherever you were, you had to freeze in your tracks and pray for the dead man's soul, although, because there were usually several possible candidates, you might not know whom you were praying for...

...But could you believe what you couldn't imagine...

...Of course, this presupposed that you had a soul, but you could demonstrate that by the act of knowledge...

...I would have to leap naked into the dark...

...So, should I ever be threatened by death, I would strap myself to a tree...

...Andrew's through the mail as well...

...They were on their way to pack his suitcase for home: his father had just died...

...Dear Brother X, Pax Christi...

...Early next morning we recited Matins and Lauds of the Office of the Dead, from a special booklet with black cardboard covers...

...If the hospital called, it could not be to say "You have a son...

...I had awakened by now from my "dogmatic slumber," and death haunted me...

...or "You have a daughter...

...And death shall be no more...

...At the back of the house we were met by the undertakers and the hearse...

...But thbse beefy, redhaired Irishmen, with their tight collars and pinky rings were more tolerable than the variets we employed at St...

...After a short service the coffin was lowered into the ground...

...The only trouble with the afterlife, said the professor, is that you can't imagine it...

...It seemed to be the voice of the dead man pleading with God...

...Pie in Domino requievit...

...I had no difficulty writing the notes of condolence we had to send to every novice or junior who had lost a parent...

...The more I thought about it, the more it confused and saddened me...

...Once we prayed before a closed coffin, when a manic-depressive priest had wandered from his sickroom down to the railroad tracks and been hit by a freight train...

...In Psychology class we went over the traditional proofs for the immortality of the soul...

...but only to inform me that someone had died...

...If no one deserved an eternity of torment in hell, did anyone deserve everlasting happiness...

...But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit...

...At the heart-sickening sound of the nine spaced chimes the whole house fell silent...

...They led the way over the grayel paths of the cemetery to the gravesite, followed by a serpentine procession of candlebearing acolytes and the rest of the community...

...A blow to the head could snuff out my intellect for good, a sudden skid and a car crash could extinguish me for good...

...By all accounts people were comforted by them, though I shudder to think how readily we served up pious formulas, one to another...

...When the last Amen was said and the doors shut, the residue of depression would linger for hours...

...Manus time fecerunt me . . . Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about...

...so was being a Christian...

...My mind couldn't leap the gap from the withered bodies of the moribund priests I had known, or the shattered bodies of the war dead, or the billions of corpses rotting in the earth, to the Glorified Body of theology...

...The funeral mass, pro vita defunctis (for those who had finished the task of life), took place later that morning...

...Still I held on...

...The letters of condolence I wrote cost me more effort now...

...yet thou dost destroy me...

...Most often the victim was somebody who had been sinking and had already been anointed...

...And, though no scripture mentioned it, surely the spirit would have to be transformed as well as the flesh...

...The mindless hum of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Glory Bes rose and sank, as we stood bunched around the pine box...

...Since the Great Silence still prevailed, I could not ask anyone, who had died, and I had to wait till the Rector broke the news at the beginning of mass...

...Even then I disliked the breed...

...Till you did, it was like the death of Everyman...

...Just as all French soldiers die on the field of honor, all Jesuits died "piously in the Lord...

...Offertory from the Mass for the Dead Death was a permanent resident at St...

...In the seminary for the first time death became a reality to me...

...In the novitiate, cradled by blissful certitude, I sometimes fell asleep imagining that I was dropping into the arms of God and expiring...

...An extraordinary fear of death began to paralyze him, so that he stopped traveling outside the house or even, after a while, walking around inside it Finally he imprisoned himself in his room, locked the windows, and pulled down the shades-until be died...

...As an altar boy I had often served at funerals...

...of one of Ours of this house...

...If the deceased was a priest, he would be dressed in a cheap set of Roman vestments, with his hands clasping a crucifix (the same one he had been given on his vow day...

...My death, then, would not be a gentle release...

...The only death I had ever really experienced till then was my grandfather's-the only death in the family in seventeen years...

...I hated that oily, soft-padding team of croquemorts...

...A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him...

...As the officiant muttered the prayers, I read over the names of the benefactors and their children who were permanently entombed in the crypt An appropriate house for the dead, with bronze doors, pale marble interior, and air that smelled a hundred years old...

...Michael the standard-bearer bring them into that holy light which thou of old didst promise to Abraham and his posterity...

...The soul was simple, not composite...

...Because at the core of yourself was an irreducible subjective source, a principle of continuity, a cognitive Entity that with every judgment it made affirmed Being and our link with it...

...Thinking literally about it was the surest way to despair...

...I stared at the gray, wrinkled skin of the corpse, thinking, as usual, how sterile the death of a celibate was...

...Novices did periodic duty in the valetudinarium, serving meals, cleaning, and doing dishes, and we could watch the progress of a new inmate, from his arrival, over the course of months of senile disintegration, till the ringing of the De Profundis announced his death...

...I wrote poetry about the ebbing of my simple faith...

...I had always believed in creation, because I couldn't conceive of an eternal universe...

...What could be more cumbersome or contradictory than the usual images of the afterlife...

...The body would be laid out in the front parlor, where the night before the burial we recited the full fifteen decades of the rosary...

...They gathered up the pieces, but they had to spray them with a strong deodorant, and if you stood too close to the casket, the nauseatingly sweet smell almost made you faint...

...One wing of the first floor, across from the refectory, housed an infirmary-nursing home for the old Jesuits who had been sent there to die...

...Shortly before I entered I had shocked my mother by exclaiming one night that I would not mind dying there and then...

...It occurred to me that as time went on, the only important news I could expect would be bad...

...In the winter the service was held at the crypt, where bodies were stored till the spring thaw...

...I had just taken my first steps in religion, and the end was barely a dot on the horizon, but I could see figures of my future in the older Jesuits around me...

...But the argument had a sting in its tail...

...I was little troubled in my novitiate days by the thought of my own death...

...Once as I walked into the dormitory I saw out of the corner of my eye a good friend of mine in tears and leaning on the shoulder of another novice as they went downstairs...

...But better suffer growing pains than linger in Childishness...

...Let St...

...And I worried about my parents and brothers and sisters away in Brooklyn...

...And then...

...I one...

...And what was the destination, anyhow, I mused, as we marched out to the cemetery...

...The evidence on death was so massive that either I swallowed and digested or I choked on it.ed or I choked on it...

...and wilt thou bring me into dust again...

...They throw a little earth upon our head, and that is the end forever...