I write these lines from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky where I have come to attend the funeral of Brother Patrick Hart. Many of you will remember that Brother Patrick was Thomas Merton’s personal secretary and then the editor of many of Merton’s posthumous books. Any of us who have ever been inspired by Merton’s personal journals (which Brother Patrick transcribed from his mentor’s nearly indecipherable handwriting), or Merton’s copious correspondence and essays have been touched by Brother Patrick’s work.

If you have never seen a Trappist burial, it is quite an unforgettable experience. The monks aren’t laid out in a coffin, but in a plain, open wooden box. The same box is reused whenever any of the monks die. The hood of the white Trappist cowl is pulled over the monk’s head, virtually obscuring his face. At the gravesite, the body is lowered directly into the earth with no covering – only a bed of ivy at the bottom of the grave to cushion it, and just a thin white cloth over it.

Standing at the gravesite, I thought of the words that many of us will hear this Wednesday when our forehead is marked with ashes: “Remember you are dust and unto dust you will return.” Thinking back on Brother Patrick’s burial, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, “Remember you have been sustained in life by the soil of the earth, and to this soil you will return.”

I wondered if the others gathered around the gravesite were thinking what I was: that each of us, in a way, was looking into our own grave, our own future.

The liturgical season of Lent, which begins Ash Wednesday, is normally a sober time of year. In the past, the emphasis was on giving up something, sacrificing as a way of repenting for a year’s worth of failings. I prefer to think of Lent as a time for pausing, a time to take stock of where we are in life. It’s a time to brush clean the dust that accumulates over the course of a year in the head and the heart, obscuring the path we need to take to find our true self. It’s a time to ask what if ? … and how can we? … and why not?

I like to spend Lent refocusing on what really matters. Am I doing all I can with my life? What do I need to change? Perhaps Lent should be as much about moving toward something as about giving something up. As I was driving the winding road that leads to the abbey, I noticed several of the houses had signs sprouting out of their front lawns that said, “Just Be Kind.” After such a horrible few months in which corruption seemed to ooze out of our every institution from government to business to our churches, “Just Be Kind,” felt like an appropriate response to this Lent, to these times.

In his Rule for monastic life, St. Benedict urges, “Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. Hour by hour, keep careful watch over all you do.” It isn’t a morbid obsession with death. Rather it’s a gentle reminder that our lives and the lives of everyone we know and love will one day end. We need to be mindful of each day we have, and to say a constant “Yes!” to this adventure of living, as mythologist Joseph Campbell once put it.

There was another powerful moment for me at Brother Patrick’s burial. It came when a ladder was lowered into the grave. A monk climbed down into Brother Patrick’s grave to receive his body as the monks above, on the ground, gently assisted it into the deep grave. Talk about facing our mortality! The good news is that the monk who went down into the grave to finish the burial process could climb up out of that grave and continue his adventure of living. So can we. Can we do it more mindfully this Lent?
The Intimate Merton: His Life From His Journals
The School Of Charity: The Letters Of Thomas Merton On Religious Renewal And Spiritual Direction
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton