Kontakion, Rohr, Frost, & David

 

Sung beautifully at the funeral of both QE2 and her husband Prince Philip, the Kontakion of the Departed can be heard during funeral services in Catholic churches and closing the burial liturgy of The Episcopal Church. It is final acknowledgement that in Time we die, each of us, and, life over, we are done. Anything beyond that is faith, which is not knowledge or certainty, but hope, an idea that is peculiar to some religions but not all. With that hope, The Kontakion praises God for the life that we have had.. 

Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy saints:
where sorrow and pain are no more;
neither sighing but life everlasting.
Thou only art immortal, the creator and maker of man:
and we are mortal formed from the dust of the earth,
and unto earth shall we return:
for so thou didst ordain,
when thou created me saying:
Dust thou art und unto dust shalt thou return.
All we go down to the dust;
yet even at the grave we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

All of this, and the total silence of the absolute black darkness in which I sit here outside on 7H porch this early pre-dawn Wednesday morning, stirs further contemplation, thoughts about life, my life, where I have been, the good fortune of where I have come, and where I might have gone instead. With the Kontakian in mind as background, listen to (or read!) Richard Rohr's meditation for today, pause and contemplate, remember how Robert Frost put it in my all Time favorite poem; and then finish with a portion of Psalm 90, about wisdom.

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Thirty-Eight: Ripening

A Noble Task

Known for her deep wisdom around death and dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946–2017) also wrote about the awakening that can occur when we consciously address aging: 

Opening deeply to the truth of our own aging is wise. Opening deeply to the truth of our own impermanence is wise. Although such opening may not come easily at first—we all know how the ego tends to resist vulnerability—it is important to do so if we wish to mindfully use the time remaining to us. . . .

To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost. . . .

Grey hair and sagginess notwithstanding, many of us still cling childishly to so much that is unreal and inessential. Many of us still cling to reputation, to imagined security, to unexamined habits of attitude and behavior, and to self-image. We have deep aversion to having all of our cherished illusions stripped away by life-in-form’s seeming indifference.

We all have reservoirs of fear, some large and some small and subtle, around entering this new terrain of unknown and mystery: our last years. What will aging to do me? To my body? To my mind? . . . Will I matter to anyone? Will I be a burden? How will I die?

We do not know. We have no clue what these years will hold for us. We have no clue what will happen tomorrow. The “moment that changed everything” usually arrives unannounced.

The only person who can answer the questions posed by the often painful challenges of aging is the person we will be in the moment we confront those circumstances. The shaping of that person into someone with greater wisdom and equanimity can begin in this moment.

For Singh, when we choose to ripen, to awaken as we age, we offer a gift to the world and future generations:

If we are to claim the last years of life as years that hold the possibility of awakening into equanimity and lightness, into the very embodiment of grace, we need to bear witness to the ripening of that possibility. Not only would it be a blessing for each of us, it would be a blessing for a world starving for such witnessing. . . .

Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, we can remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We can remain in our intention to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.

 

Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2014), 12, 16–17, 17–18, 21, 24.

Image credit: Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 12, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper, Trinity Tree (detail), 2022, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 7, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story. 

Image inspiration: Aging and transformation: the natural cycle of life, learning, growing, sharing. We flower, we leaf, we shed, we become.

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The Road Not Taken 

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

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Psalm 90    Domino, refugium

LORD, thou hast been our refuge,
    from one generation to another.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever the earth and the world were made,
    thou art God from everlasting, and the world without end.
Thou turnest man to destruction;
    again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men.
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday
     when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
As soon as thou scatterest them they are even as a sleep,
    and fade away suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green, and groweth up;
    but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.
For we consume away in thy displeasure,
    and are afraid at thy wrathful indignation.
Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee,
    and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For when thou are angry all our days are gone;  

we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.

The days of our age are threescore years and ten;
and though men be so strong that thy come to fourscore years,
    yet is their strength then but labor and sorrow,
    so soon passeth it away, and we are gone.
So teach us to number our days,
    that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.