Vigils Reading

DEATH AND THE MONK

From “The Meaning of the Monastic Life” by Fr Louis Bouyer2 ◊◊◊

It is not purely and simply by dying that we shall live, but by dying such a death that it kills death itself — and it is only the death of Christ that can do that. For it is not the life of the mortal body which has injured the life of the soul. It is, on the contrary, the death of the soul which has injured the body and made it mortal. Life will be won back by the resurrection, not of the soul alone, but of the human being in its unity, inseparably body and soul. And if the passage through death can lead to the resurrection, it is only in as much as the soul, which has become alive again in Christ, has been made capable of burning away the death of the body as with a red-hot iron and of causing it to evaporate in its own flame.

The monk goes forward to meet death because he believes that this miracle, the greatest of all, has been accomplished in the death of Christ: because he believes that Christ was Life, the very Life of God, and that in making physical death his own, he has robbed the evil one of all his power and all his empire which are annihilated by this very act. Again he goes forward to meet death because he believes that Christ now and for the future lives in him: and finally because he believes that what has taken place in Christ will be reproduced in himself, in the same manner.

The death of the monk, so desired and sought after day after day, is then only the supreme evidence of his faith, his faith in Christ vanquishing death in himself, his faith in Christ present in his followers to vanquish it in them. The monk’s mortification is ultimately nothing more than his witness given to Christ,

the witness of his faith, which makes it clear that it is not only an intellectual thing but an engagement of the whole being