By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I must not get it. By “it” I mean the transitory nature of life and all its manifestations. I seem to grasp the concept, at least intellectually, but then it slips my mind again. So I keep getting reminders. Two arrived just recently.
As a boy, I spent many happy hours at the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. The 2017 closure was difficult, like the loss of a childhood home and passing of a simple, benevolent era. I relived the loss recently when I helped a friend find new homes for dozens of the books from the monastery’s old library. It took me back a dozen years ago, to when I cleaned up and closed out my mother’s sweet little home while she was dying.
Sad news from back east soon followed. Many generations of my ancestral family attended the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Burlington, Vermont, a lovely, century-old, gothic edifice, constructed of local red stone and New England granite. There, they were baptized, married, and sent off to burial in the nearby family cemetery. They also celebrated all the moments in between. The cathedral was destroyed in 1972 during an arson fire set by deranged former altar boy using votive candles. I just learned that the replacement church now is closed, and the beautiful park land around it soon will be sold for commercial development.
The Kentucky monk Thomas Merton once wrote, “There is no need for a man to make his drinking cup out of a skull in order to remind himself of the elementary fact that he will not live forever. But, nevertheless, we all need to be reminded of it.” (“Death of a Trappist,” Early Essays 1947-1952) My recent reminders felt like a personalized drinking cup skull.
When I get the reminders, I long to be swept away, perhaps into Norman Mclean’s A River Runs Through It, into the scene where Norman sits contentedly with his brother Paul and his father by a river after catching a large fish: “My brother stood before us, not on a bank of the Big Blackfoot River, but suspended above the earth, free from all its laws, like a work of art.” The bliss recedes, as Mclean continues: “And I knew just as surely, and just as clearly, that life is not a work of art and that the moment could not last.” Norman learns of Paul’s murder in the very next scene.
The truth is that I struggle with these reminders. My default position is to cling stubbornly to ephemeral beauty, to rebel against our temporal natures, to resist the impermanence of the good. I want to sue someone, to argue that it is patently unfair, and even cruel, that delightful places, wonderful things, and lovely people, are so fleeting.
According to Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield, “Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.” (Buddha’s Little Instruction Book). Writing about the closure of the Utah Abbey, Fr. Brendan Freeman explained in Cistercian Studies Quarterly: “It comes down to this: no matter where we are on this earth we have no permanent dwelling. Our true homeland is not here; our true monastery is not a building or a visible place. It is in the heart, in the center of our being-a space that can never be diminished or demolished.”
They probably are right, and I just need to work on making peace with it. My recurring and recent history proves it will take me a while to get there. After all, even such an expert on detachment as the Dalai Lama has said, “Neither a space station nor an enlightened mind can be realized in a day.”
