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  A TIME TO DIE

  NICOLAS DIAT

  A Time to Die

  Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life

  Translated by Mary Dudro

  Illustrated by David le Merrer

  IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

  Original French edition:

  Un temps pour mourir:

  Derniers jours de la vie des moines: recit

  © 2018 Librairie Artheme Fayard, Paris

  Cover art:

  Saint Francis with a skull in his hands

  c. 1630, School of Francisco de Zurbaran

  Found in the collection of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg

  Heritage Image Partnership Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo.

  Cover design by John Herreid

  © 2019 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-62164-274-9 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-64229-083-7 (EB)

  Library of Congress Catalogue number 2019931437

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my friend Robert Cardinal Sarah

  Hie jacet pulvis, cinis et nihil.

  (Here lies dust, ashes, and nothing more.)

  —Inscription on the tombstone of

  Antonio Cardinal Barberini,

  Our Lady of the Conception

  of the Capuchins, Rome

  We must learn how to risk fear as we risk death, true courage is to be found in this risk.

  —Georges Bernanos,

  Dialogues of the Carmelites

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Extraordinary Stories

  I A Life Cut Short

  Lagrasse Abbey

  II The Shadow of the Black Mountain

  En-Calcat Abbey

  III A Fortress Away from the World

  Solesmes Abbey

  IV The Smile of Brother Théophane

  Sept-Fons Abbey

  V Rainy Days

  Cîteaux Abbey

  VI The Art of a Happy Death

  Fontgombault Abbey

  VII How to Say Goodbye

  Mondaye Abbey

  VIII The Deaths of the Recluses

  The Grande Chartreuse Monastery

  Epilogue—A Bus in the Night

  Those for Whom the Road Begins

  More from Ignatius Press

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  A Time to Die is the title of Nicolas Diat’s new book. What audacious simplicity, but also what great faith to dare approach such a question that, conventionally, it is practically forbidden to discuss. But, as always, Nicolas Diat has written with great skill and depth. He leads us to the abbeys to help his readers enter into the mystery of death.

  Monasteries are places where one learns to live and die in an atmosphere of silent prayer, the gaze always turned toward the beyond and the One who made us and whom we contemplate—because “from my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). All those who pray consider life, the world, and death with confidence and emotion, and, at every moment, discern the presence of God within them. It is certain the monks, too, are familiar with the difficult and tragic reality of death. They experience the anguish, the fear at the approach of the “6:00 A.M. bus that disappears into the darkness”. But, in these elevated places of prayer, since the Resurrection of Christ, death is an Easter, a passage. We lay aside the bodily exterior with which we could not move into the divine atmosphere. Those who leave us, like Brother Vincent-Marie de la Resurrection, at the abbey of Lagrasse, Father Dominique, at En-Calcat, Brother Buisson, at Solesmes, Father Joël, at Mondaye, and the magnificent hermits of the Grande Chartreuse, Dom Landuin, Brother Jean, Dom Gabriel, Dom Andre Poisson, continue to live, to know, to love, without being limited by the fragility of their bodies or hindered by the shackles of sin. Their death is a passage into a life that man has prepared here below and that God continues without end. Death places us in the infinity and depths of God.

  In reading A Time to Die, we better understand that death is the most important act of earthly existence. All life is made to explode, to go farther, to merge with Life, with God.

  I am infinitely thankful to Nicolas Diat for having brought us for a moment before the mystery of death, and I recommend to all the reading of this wonderful book.

  Robert Cardinal Sarah

  Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments

  EXTRAORDINARY STORIES

  Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. . . . For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. . . All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:2; 3:1-2, 20

  In Rome, at the foot of the Via Veneto, behind the Fountain of the Bees, the crypt of the Capuchin church presents a strange sight. From floor to ceiling, five chapels are ornamented with the bones of monks from ages past. At the entrance, a somber wooden placard warns visitors: “We were like you; you will be like us.”

  Embalmed monks, fixed in perpetual stillness, re-clothed in their habits, imitate postures of prayer. Fibulas, tibias, hu-meri, and femurs decorate the walls and arches. Piles of bones, heaps of skulls, vertebrae, and ribs that give form to the most sophisticated creations now compose a surrealist reverie.

  “The greatest hoax of the Capuchins is that they impose the adoration of their dead victims upon the living.” In La Reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste (Queen Albemarle or the last tourist),1 the story of a trip to Italy, Jean-Paul Sartre thus mocks the delirium of these religious.

  These macabre ornaments intensify sorrowful passions. They betray a disordered relationship with death. One would like to believe that this is merely a parody or carnival pantomime. When one leaves the crypts to return to life, the din of Roman traffic reveals charms we never noticed before.

  This baroque exultation is the perfect antithesis to the denial of death that pervades our present times. Modern man has an obsessive fear. He does not want to admit that life has an end. He searches by every means to forget the Grim Reaper. Death is disguised with makeup, like a hated and nightmarish reality. God is dead, and so is death. The Homo deus runs like a madman who seeks to catch the flag of immortality by force.

  Alas, it is enough to enter a funeral home one day, where undertakers reign supreme, in order to perceive the success of this utopic vision. A new extreme was reached when a novel funeral practice arrived from the United Sates: the liquefaction of bodies through alkaline hydrolysis. The prophecy of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is upon us.

  In 1995, François Mitterrand wrote the remarkable preface for Marie de Hennezel’s La Mort intime (Intimate death).2 Tired and ill, the president of the Republic was himself at the end of life’s path. “Never before, perhaps, has the relationship to death been so impoverished as in this time of spiritual desolation when men, in their rush to exist, seem to avoid all mystery”, he lamented. Raised in Jarnac, he loved the countryside world where men died in their homes. Family, friends, neighbors came to keep vigil over the body of the deceased. Often, the departed extraordinary stories 13 reposed in the same bed where he had rested during life. The family themselves took care of the body. The shutters of the bedroom were closed. After the funeral Mass, the casket traveled through the village to the cemetery. For many months, the family would dress in black as a sign of mourning.

  Since that not-so-long-ago era, the West has worked hard to bury death more deeply in the vaults of its history.

  Today, the liturgy of death no longer exits. Yet fear and anxiety have never been as strong. Men no longer know how to die.

  In this desolate wor
ld, I had the idea to take the path of the great monasteries in order to discover what the monks might have to teach us about death. Behind cloister walls, they pass their existence in prayer and reflection on the last things. I thought their testimonies could help people understand suffering, sickness, pain, and the final moments of life. They have known complicated deaths, quick deaths, simple deaths. They have confronted death more often, and more intimately, than most who live outside monastery walls. I had an intuition, when I began this work, that the monks would not hide anything from me, that they would tell me truthfully about the death of their members. The accounts collected in the abbeys I visited did not disappoint me.

  I would like for this book to offer some hope, because the monks show us that a humane death is possible. Twenty-first-century man is not condemned to lonely endings, without love, in anonymous hospital rooms. Twenty-first-century man is not condemned to the false humanity of a death disguised and distorted in disembodied funeral parlors.

  Today, the monks are perhaps the last remaining people who can understand the words of Saint Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun”:

  Praise be to you, my Lord,

  for our sister Corporeal Death,

  from whom no living man can escape.

  Sorrowful are they who die in mortal sin;

  happy are they whom she finds living according to your will,

  for the second death can do them no harm.

  The saint of the Middle Ages no doubt also knew the apothegms of the Desert Fathers. In these accounts attributed to the hermits who populated Egypt during the fourth century, one can read a number of descriptions of the deaths of the first monks in Christianity. That of Abba Sisoes is especially remarkable:

  It was said of Abba Sisoes that when he was at the point of death, while the Fathers were sitting beside him, his face shone like the sun. He said to them: “Look, Abba Anthony is coming.” A little later he said, “Look, the choir of prophets is coming.” Again, his countenance shone with brightness and he said: “Look, the choir of apostles is coming.” His countenance increased in brightness, and lo, he spoke with someone. And the old men asked him, “With whom are you speaking, Father?” He said: “Look, the angels are coming to fetch me, and I am begging them to let me do a little penance.” The old men said to him, “You have no need to do penance, Father.” But the old man said to them, “Truly, I do not think I have even made a beginning yet.” Now they all knew that he was perfect. Once more his countenance suddenly became like the sun and they were all filled extraordinary stories 15 with fear. He said to them: “Look, the Lord is coming and he’s saying, ‘Bring me the vessel from the desert.’ ” [And at that moment, he gave up his spirit.] Then there was as a flash of lightning and all the house was filled with a sweet odour.3

  The stories told me by the Benedictines of En-Calcat, Solesmes, and Fontgombault, the Trappists of Sept-Fons, the Cistercians of Cîteaux, the Canons of Lagrasse, the Pre-monstratensians of Mondaye, and the hermits of the Grande Chartreuse are all as beautiful and exceptional as the memorable stories from ancient times.

  The death of Abba Sisoes reminds me of the courage of Brother Vincent, a young canon crippled by multiple sclerosis, of the lucidity of Dom Landuin, a Carthusian eager to rejoin heaven, and of the grandeur of Brother Pierre, an old lay brother, pious and generous.

  On the Bourbon moors, at Sept-Fons, and by the banks of the Creuse, at Fontgombault, the monks spoke to me of the radiant, peaceful, and luminous deaths of the friends of God.

  These men are not heroes. Their fears, their sorrows, their torments are very real. The high walls of the monastery do not change anything about death. Sickness can become cruel, and the extremities of suffering can crush the body. What is exemplary about the monks is to be found elsewhere.

  It lies in their humility and simplicity. When death approaches, and its hand reveals its strength, the monks remain the same. They are like happy and naïve children who wait with impatience to open a gift. They have no doubts about the fulfillment of the promise.

  In Cinq méditations sur la mort, autrement dit sur la vie (Five Meditations on Death: In Other Words. . . On Life),4 François Cheng offers us this delicate poem:

  Do not forget those in the depths of the abyss,

  Without fire, lamp, consoling cheek,

  Helping hand. . . Do not forget them,

  Because they remember flashes of childhood,

  Bursts of youth—life echoing in

  Fountains, in the driving wind—where will they go

  If you forget them, you, God of memory?

  In order not to be forgotten by God before leaving this world, we have much to learn from the monks. Their humanity, their courage, and their sincerity command admiration.

  These keys open many doors.

  I

  A Life Cut Short

  Lagrasse Abbey

  On July 19, 2014, I came for the first time to the village of Lagrasse. In the middle of the hilly and dry Corbieres, the abbey of the Canons Regular of the Mother of God was still unknown to me. Despite the banks of the Orbieu, connected by the Pont-Vieux with its delicate arches, and the orderly gardens surrounding an elegant wall, the monastery seemed to me hieratic and imposing. The heavy iron gates, the main courtyard, the aristocratic façades gave the impression of entering an Occitan castle.

  The buildings, which harmoniously combine Carolingian, Roman, and classical elements, the cloister of fiery, yellow sandstone, the imposing refectory, the subtle light in the abbey church, the canals of living water: history surfaces in the smallest of stones. Lagrasse is a place where the spirit breathes.

  The religious looked fine in their large white habits. At the head of the community, Father Abbot Emmanuel-Marie, a rigorous and ascetic Breton, had a pleasing air about him. When he welcomed me to Lagrasse, shortly after my arrival, I knew straightaway that I had met an upright, intelligent, and humble man.

  The thirty-five Augustinians who live within these walls are young. They come from all over France. Often, brilliant careers had been offered them. They preferred the service of God.

  One morning, I was in the gardens and fields that surround the monastery. The wind that swept down the hills made the summer heat bearable. The canons, protected by their worn, straw hats, were busy in the huge vegetable gardens. I took a path lined with old olive trees that crossed the property. It opened onto a vast prospect of vineyards and valleys. I did not expect to find the monks’ cemetery deep in the meadows.

  At the entrance of the enclosure, I stopped by a freshly dug grave, poorly covered with a tarp that the wind had displaced. I remained bewildered a long while in front of this large pit. The scene left little room for doubt; the monks were preparing to bury one of their own. The rest of the cemetery, nearly abandoned, only increased my confusion. I went back forthwith, deciding to forget this macabre discovery.

  On the way back, I entered the cloister. The faint trickle of a fountain enlivened the midday silence. A religious was enjoying some fresh air in the arcades. He was in a large medical chair. Beside him, seated on a small bench, an infirmarian watched his every move. Passing in front of the young canon, I was struck by the vigor of his gaze. And by his fatigue, his fragility, too. I did not dare make a connection with the walk that had led me to the cemetery.

  After lunch, I asked a canon about the identity of the mysterious invalid. I remember how his words, like lightning, came crashing down: “That is Brother Vincent-Marie. He is thirty-six years old. He suffers from multiple sclerosis.” Then I asked him: “This morning, I discovered a grave in the cemetery. . .” The answer fell, inexorable: “Yes, it is for Brother Vincent.”

  My anger and my sadness were silent. How could God abandon a young monk? How could he allow death to prowl around a young man at the dawn of his life?

  Multiple sclerosis is a sickness that attacks the central nervous system, the brain, the optic nerves, and the spinal cord. Its symptoms vary: numbness of a limb, blu
rred vision, sensations of electric shock in the body. The disease progresses in stages and, after a few years, leaves permanent consequences. Movement control, sensory perception, memory, speaking become difficult, then impossible.

  Brother Vincent-Marie de la Resurrection, formerly Benoît Carbonell, a canon of Lagrasse Abbey who died at thirty-eight years of age, was suffering from rapid and progressive multiple sclerosis. He was born on March 15, 1978, and he died in his monastery on Sunday morning, April 10, 2016.

  A monk enters an abbey in search of God. He chooses to devote his days to prayer, to the salvation of souls. Disease and the prospect of death radically change the existence of all men. I wanted to know if it was the same for religious. Did Brother Vincent fear death? Did he feel any particular anxiety when the passage became more evident? Did he fight to put off the inevitable? Who was this young canon walled up in the little room of an infirmary?

  Benoît Carbonell grew up in a farming family in Normandy, where he experienced a simple and modest childhood. Joyful, cheerful, early on he showed a natural instinct for fixing things. Without any particular taste for studying, he chose to become an electrician. On his parents’ farm, the young man had a workshop where he collected an incredible number of objects of all kinds. Later on, he arrived at the abbey with a small truck filled with radiators, neon lighting, electrical circuits, and light bulbs.

  Brother Vincent never fully left behind his native Norman land, the hunting parties, country gatherings, or good fellowship. He had strong sense of family and loved his parents, his brothers, and his sister. For him, abandonment to God was not an easy path. Brother Vincent entered Lagrasse as a novice in 2005. He already knew he was sick. Toward the age of twenty, he had to receive a triple vaccine, a common practice in his profession. Later on, the doctors explained to him that that is when the multiple sclerosis no doubt began.