Trappist Way of Death

I arrived at the church yesterday around 2:30, and took my place in the aisle choir stalls. There were new arrivals, all clearly grieving. Two monks were reading aloud the Psalms, as they had been doing every since his body was brought into the church. It felt like a time warp, only a few hours before I'd left in the freezing night air, and returned in the daylight to find things exactly as they were when I left. It was a little chilly in the church, and it could just as easily have been the 12th century as the 21st, in that Abbey church of stark whiteness, with that "awesome presence" as Br. Paul describes it filling the atmosphere so thick you can hardly take a breath without hearing God's own breathing.

The daylight revealed more than ever that the body is nothing but a home for the soul while the soul is in human form. It was not Fr. Chrysogonus in the casket. It didn't even look like him. Even the ravages of illness don't do what I saw in the daylight. For the first time I realized that death removes the essence of the individual. Sure, I saw my own father in his coffin, and somewhat noticed the difference, but yesterday I saw it in the spiritual sense. The beautiful soul had departed, the "golden bowl is broken." I was sitting with a corpse, not a man. I was sitting with a memory, and honoring what had been the body of someone very dear, to many people. Yet, Fr. Chrysogonus was not in that coffin and no where near the church. He had already gone to the celestial choir, no doubt to tune them up a bit.

And when it came time for the funeral, I was moved by what I continue to see as the silent solemnity with which the Trappist worship, pray, and bury their dead. Every piece of chant we sang was a chant Fr. Chrysogonus had adapted from the Gregorian original. Was his name listed anywhere under any of those chants? Absolutely not. Fr. Chrysogonus was convinced that any good musical thing he did came from the Holy Spirit and not through himself. A very moving moment at the offertory was when his publisher played on the guitar, "Christ is risen, truly risen." A piece composed by Father.

At the grave we sang litanies and some responses as they carefully -- no, lovingly -- lowered his body down into the grave. I was honored to throw a handful of dirt into the grave and say a simple, "goodbye, Father."