To exist is to bring the future to pass, and this is true from the rather innocuous fact that, to write this article, I must put on paper what I might not yet have formulated, even just mentally, to more dramatic achievements such as changes in career path and the completion of some truly monumental project. But in the future lies death—unwelcome a thought though this may be—not as something lurking in wait to spring the cruelest surprise on me possible, but as the very culmination of “tomorrow” or “future”. There was nothing macabre in Heidegger’s characterization of human existence as “being-unto-death”. What it was, though, was an invitation to live life without illusions.

The Lenten Season started with Ash Wednesday and the rite of the acceptance of ashes. That, for me, is the more acceptable way of putting it. Liturgically, the proper term would be “imposition of ashes”, imponere being the Latin infinitive, “to put on”. But really, the Church, much less the priest, imposes penance and conversion on none; it just cannot be done. Penance and conversion are, in Scheler’s terms, “moral acts of self-conquest”. They belong to the future of a person, to the realm of possibilities that only she can bring about! In the Old Testament people put on sackcloth and ashes to manifest a resolve to forsake sin and evil. When Jonah warned the inhabitants of Nineveh—after having been spewed out of the whale’s belly—that Divine wrath was about to reduce them to ashes, the delightful Old Testament tale describes how all, from king to lowly beast, put on sackcloth and sat on ashes. Since it is impossible for parish priests to provide enough ashes on which their parishioners might sit, smearing them on their foreheads has, for ages now, seemed good enough a compromise. I think it would be a better idea for the priest merely to offer the ashes to the people and for them to put them on themselves to make clear that they make the decision to do penance.

There is newer “formula” now, but the older one is what I used on Ash Wednesday: “Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” They are, without a doubt, awful words, and it is the awfulness of death that the Lenten Season that leads to the Solemn Commemoration of the Passover is all about.

In the face of death, there are different options. One is capitulation—bemoan the cruelty of a life fated for the grave, and suicide is a desperate attempt at some kind of control. Rather than await death, I bring it about. But if death is ultimate meaninglessness, what point might here be in hastening it? Another posture is what figures prominently in Camus’ works: “heroic despair”. He is a hero who in the face of death’s intransigence rebels against for as long as he can hold his arms aloft and hold it at bay. Whether capitulation or heroic despair, however, death is ultimately defeat.

One can also attempt to “outrun” it— and mouthing platitudes like “everyone dies”, kanya-kanyang araw, etc. are pathetic in their futility at putting one over death: saying what will happen to oneself, accepting its inevitability. But death is not something you can theoretically entertain, although it can be the subject of theoretical inquiry. Dying will always be the ultimate human experience sui generic! You can make distract yourself by idle curiosity over the deaths of others, but that will never be your death. Of this, there is just no way to anticipate it nor really to prepare for it.

Ashes are what are left over when every human pretense or conceit is consumed in its own emptiness. “You are a being in whom death is inscribed”. That should be an acceptable alternative to the words priests—and some lay ministers—mumble (often unintelligibly) during the Rite.

The genius of Christianity (a phrase I owe to Chateaubriand) consists in facing death in the eye and exalting in the memory and the love of a man who accepted death and taught us how to die. It does not promise an escape from death; it does not teach that death is an illusion. Ash Wednesday is the first stark reminder of death’s painful reality – and that is why ashes are smeared on our otherwise clean faces. What Nietzsche found detestable about Christianity is that it had made of what he called the virtues of the “weak”—humility, obedience, patience, forgiveness —the marks of the blessed, that it had raised a crucified man, one purchased at the price of a slave—to the status of “Lord”! Masters of irony is what Nietzsche thought of us Christians. (It will not take much to convince me that he in fact had a secret admiration for Christianity “as it should be”.) To my mind, he was paying Christianity a tribute in acknowledging that it neither shunned death nor taught it to be illusory.

The Whole of the Solemn Paschal Triduum—from the Holy Thursday till the Easter Vigil—for which the entire Lenten Season is a period of preparation—is the ritualized confrontation with death. Jesus dies—and everything in word and ritual brings this point home with unmistakable clarity. The evangelists muster the power of imagery—darkness at noon, the death-cry from the cross, the hastened burial before the ritual start of Passover—and the liturgy employs the force of symbolic suggestion: the bare altar, the solitary cross, muted bells, the readings that end on the somber note of Jesus’ burial. I, who take part in these rituals, am summoned to resoluteness: to face the project of living and dying, with the latter not as an afterthought but a qualifier of the former! Thought should not make me any less enthusiastic about living. In fact it should keep me in earnest about what I set out to do, to achieve and to become, in the full awareness that there is no “everlasting return” that will forever make the same opportunities available.

What then of the Resurrection? Is this not the negation of death? Interestingly, what the apostles have of the Lord after the fateful Calvary debacle is not the resumption of “the way they were”, as if his death were nothing more than a brief interlude to their peregrinations and their routine affairs. They had visions, glimpses, brief encounters—and it was never the same again; glorious, to be sure, but no prolongation of what had come before. In fact Jesus showed them his wounded hands and side—the scars of death to make it clear to them that it was he who had been buried. What the Resurrection of the Lord teaches the world is that the reality of death is not synonymous with the defeat of life and its yearning for wholeness and completeness.

Death ends life, and until one has accepted this, one has not accepted life. But death does not defeat life nor make it meaningless unless one makes the unjustified assumption that it swallows everything, meaning, worth and value, included, in abysmal senselessness. But whether there is promise of fulfillment or not, completeness or its failure, depends on the life one lives—and the worst one can do with life is to live it with recklessness born out of deceiving oneself that it will be forever! So it is that in the Holy Week it is a life lived in complete generosity, in gift of self, in life truly transcendent because it responds to the summons of the needy Other that is ritualized as mortality is. Death is recognized, and we humbly acknowledge the fragility of the human condition, our condition, but we are not vanquished by it.

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com