The Discomfort of Death
Can you digest the feast of Easter without first descending into the stillness and darkness of Lent?
We went fishing last Friday. And even though I have been reeling in fish ever since I was a child there is still something about plucking these living, breathing, beautiful, creatures from the water and setting them aside to die on the shore that still feels so weighty to me.
I can still remember myself as a little girl, sitting on the beach while the fish that our family had caught thumped around on the sand or in a bucket, gasping for air, blinking their eyes and searching the horizon for something – me guess being the way back to the ocean. Those evenings provided my earliest confrontations with the tension between life and death, and the inner conflict that results on account of it. In time, the thumping slows, the blinking subsides, and the gills eventually cease to open and then close, and as they do you understand your role and responsibility to a life that is now extinguished.
It used to be that to eat, to survive, to be sustained and nourished, meant to engage daily with this conflict. The same motion that once brought sustenance to ones lips simultaneously drew them into a space of recognition and awareness of the process that delivered it. That process always, in some way, involving death.
Something dies so that we might live. Thats the way things go here.
Though drawing near to death is uncomfortable, isn’t it? It’s painful, raw, messy, unsettling. And some might even say the reminder of death in the production of our meals taints the pallet, robbing the food of flavor and draining our eating of some measure of enjoyment.
But what if the point of eating isn’t as much for enjoyment or ease as it is remembrance and the cultivation of reverence? What if God’s intention in the design of the process that sustains our flesh in this life is intended to bring us into a daily practice of recognizing that ongoing vitality necessitates sacrifice?
Something has died so that we might live.
I often think about this in light of the shift referenced in the Garden of Eden. Before the fall, before sin entered into things, we were given plants as food, but after the fall, we were given animals for nourishment. Why is that? And is it possible that in some way that shift involved a new practice that would somehow aid in our ongoing sanctification? Something able to yield reverence and gratitude for what we have been given?
I have no idea; these are just questions that I am knocking around in my head.
But getting back to the point, death is uncomfortable. It produces tension and conflict. Which might explain why our food system, and I would also argue the church, have created so much distance for us from it.
Now we get to inhabit the role of consumers of cuts of meat that have been stripped of all signs of their former lives – eyes, skin, scales, bones, fur, and then sanitized and dyed and presented in cellophane wrappers under new names like pork, veal, or beef. And we are then afforded the luxury of enjoying these meals from a distance, detached from the living breathing pigs, calves, cows, and fish whose lives have been sacrificed on account of it.
And sometimes it seems like the Western Church has followed suit, attempting to attract and appeal to the taste of detached parishioners who long to nourish their lives and satiate their palates without being drawn into the conflict and tension of the sacrifice that produced that sustenance. Why is it that the church can so often be seen prostituting itself on the alters of both ease and convenience?
More importantly, in what ways are these models of food, farming, and formation, shaping us? Are they better equipping us to deal with life and death? Are they yielding some increase in reverence? Are we becoming less afraid, less compelled by a sense of scarcity, more secure, and more grateful? What is the produce in people, planet, and church?
And can you even digest the feast of Easter without first drawing near to the stillness and darkness of Lent? Can you fully encounter the glory of the resurrecti
on without descending with Christ into the Valley of Death? Should we, can we, be dismissed from responsibility and awareness the part of the process that yield discomfort or cause tension and still live as heirs of its inheritance here on earth?
A Practice for Lent:
At some point this week take some time to prepare a meal slowly. Make it your goal to make this meal as inconvenient as possible. Find yourself some cut of meat that actually resembles the creature from whom it came. If you are able, visit a farm, consider the animals there, look them in the face. Stay them for a bit and take note of their ways, how they groom themselves and one another, how they tend to their young, how they move their faces, what you notice about their features. Then consider their deaths and the process that will one day prepare them for your plate. Do whatever you can to connect these living and breathing animals with your meal. After that, pause for a bit to say a prayer thanking God for their life and for the way that the lives of others like them provide you with nourishment.
If you are a vegetarian or a vegan you can do the same with plants and the birds and animals that are driven out of their habitats to make room for those crops to grow. The sacrifice is different, yes, but not absent. Lean into it.
In both, try to embody the fullness of your position as one who is reliant on sacrifice to be sustained. Think about it as you cut, trim, simmer, sauté, and then consume.
What does that reminder provoke in you?