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Reflection for September 17, 2006

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These are the words of Alan Seeger, an American who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War and did indeed have a rendezvous with Death, being killed in action two years later on the Western Front in France. He was, by the way, the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger whom I'm sure many of you remember from his performances over the past fifty years.

I quote Alan Seeger's poem because in today's Gospel reading Jesus himself tells St. Peter that he, too, has a rendezvous with Death - not to succumb to it passively as it seems we all must do, but to overcome it as that one big shadow over our lives that won't go away - that final event which Shakespeare says, "puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of . . ."

How much of civilization has been designed to forestall Death, to keep it at bay! Law, science, government, education, the military, - you name it. Don't they all have to do with keeping us alive as long as possible, with confronting Death whenever it encroaches upon us too aggressively? Don't so many of our cultural creations - like music, literature, entertainment, even sports - serve to make of life something enjoyable enough to help us forget Death for the time being? And yet how much of our wealth goes into also creating lethal methods of forestalling Death, so that we wind up co-opted by Death after all, having become quick to bestow it on others before they bestow it on us?

Indeed, in today's Gospel the anticipated agents of Jesus' death are those who (we might assume) were the least lethal people in society, the Temple priests and scribes, the theological leaders of Israel. But why would they want to crucify Jesus? Because they saw him as an agent of Death; they saw him as advocating changes that threatened their secure way of life, so much so that they could eventually say, " It is better that one man die than that the whole nation perish." All of which brings us round to the fact that Death, the fact that we all must die, freezes us in place, makes us live not exuberantly but cautiously, ever on guard - ever with sword drawn (be it lingual or of steel) or prescriptions handy lest Death hit us from our blind side.

It's this Nemesis with which Jesus has a rendezvous - not to shrink before it as we do but to unmask it, show it to be nothing more than a boundary to be crossed like so many other boundaries we have crossed during our lives. (Otherwise why does St. Paul say, "I die daily"?) For it's not so much death but our fear of death that's the problem - our exaggeration of its finality, a finality Christ will erode by walking into that upper room on Easter Sunday not as a ghost but as someone very much alive, as someone over whom we can say death shall have no dominion.

Given his own determination to confront Death and our fear of Death, I think Jesus would have found in Alan Seeger's poem evidence of a truly kindred spirit - especially in Alan's last verse where he writes: God knows 'twere better to be deep / Pillowed in silk and scented down, / Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, / Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, . . . / But I've a rendezvous with Death / At midnight in some flaming town, / When Spring trips north again this year, / And I to my pledged word am true, / I shall not fail that rendezvous.

-- Geoff Wood