On a recent trip to England, I visited the ancient Norman church, Saint Mary's, Iffley, where a 13th-century anchoress (a female hermit) by the name of Annora resided. She lived enclosed in a room attached to the cathedral, with a stone coffin lid on the floor of her cell.
Such a practice calls to mind a scene in Flannery O'Connor's short story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” A vagrant approaches a farmhouse and offers to do chores in exchange for a couple of meals and a place to sleep overnight. The lady of the house accepts, but tells him he'll have to sleep in “that car yonder.”
“That's fine, ma'am,” he tells her. “You know, the monks of old slept in their coffins.”
“Well,” the lady sniffs, “they wasn't as advanced as we are.”
Like the farmer, we're tempted to see Annora and her way of living as a quaint practice of a less civilized era. Our dominant culture has no way to make sense of sleeping with coffins, other than in science fiction. If we try to visualize a coffin lying open in the middle of the room, we're most likely to picture a vampire movie.
Who today can take someone like Annora seriously? “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly,” right? We should not be so morbidly focused on death, dying and life after death. The cliché, “You're so otherworldly, you're no worldly good,” comes to mind as a possible description of Annora's life. We should be about living rather than dying.
Not only does Annora's willingness to have death constantly before her in such a vivid way strike us as morbid, her life of enclosure seems equally problematic. Someone who lives enclosed with a coffin must be mad. Who in her right mind would willingly waste her life in this way?
And yet, people do live “enclosed” in all sorts of ways today. Gated communities come to mind. But so do the myriad of ways we separate ourselves from the homeless, the poor, the mentally handicapped, and others who make us uncomfortable. The question that Annora's life raises for us is whether we live by disciplines or restrictions that deform or form us toward lives of faithfulness.
Seminary professor Glenn Hinson once took his students to the monastery at Gethsemane, Ky., to visit the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton. One student asked, “What's a smart man like you doing in a place like this?” Merton replied, “I believe in the life of prayer.” Merton drew the student's attention away from Merton's own quite formidable talents and intellect to a broader vision of practices that have sustained the church for generations — practices that enable the church together to witness more fully to God.
Surely, Annora too, though separated from Merton by centuries, oriented her life in a similar way. She understood that we cannot deny our own death and dying if we are to become transformed. It is no coincidence that early Christians were baptized in tomb-like structures, descending three steps into the “watery grave” and emerging from the water into new life. Many Baptist churches today have a similar kind of baptistery. And the Baptist practice of full immersion vividly reenacts death and new life. By having a coffin lid always before her, Annora was remembering her baptism.
I must confess that I do not welcome my own signs of aging — graying hair, aches and pains here and there, signs of flabbiness. I have wondered how to age gracefully in a culture obsessed with youth, beauty and a denial of death (at least a denial of our own death).
I dare say aging gracefully was not something Annora worried about. Her life was more about living gracefully. She lived with death always before her, not because she thought death itself was good. Rather the story that determined her life told her not to fear death (or aging) because death had no power over her. It could not separate her from the love of God.
The more deadly “enclosure” today is when we live more determined by our fears than by our love of God. Annora knew that fearing death meant fearing life, that is, life lived in faithful communion with God and others. Such communion calls for dying to all false ways of living as we journey in time, allowing God to transform us in the process.
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– Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]