“They saw him welcoming death as one greets a dear friend.”
Ward, The Desert Fathers, p. 118
For three days, we read in the Desert Fathers, Abba Agatho lay on his bed, eyes open, waiting for death. When finally, the “brothers nudged him” asking “‘Abba, where are you?’” he told them “‘I am standing before the judgement of God.’”
The brothers then asked “‘Are you afraid?’” In response to his brothers’ distress Agatho answers “‘I worked as hard as I could to keep the commandments of God but I am only human, and I do not know if my works will be pleasing in God’s sight.’”
Rather than trusting in even works “in accordance with God’s will” Agatho instead trusts in the mercy of God. And, having given himself over to mercy, he asks the brothers to no longer talk to him and “breathed forth his soul with joy” and welcoming death as “a dear friend.”
By God’s grace, Agatho was “in all thing vigilant”— that is, guarded his soul—and so able to welcome. To many of us today, this might seem beyond most of us—and maybe it is. But having been with people at the end of their lives, I think Abba Agatho’s death is more common than we think. Not only have I seen people who greet death “like a dear friend,” that is gently, quietly, and with gratitude, I’ve seen something else.
Just as with Abba Agatho, a good death can bring others to repentance. Rather than a narrow and negative sense of sorrow for their sins, the death of a loved one can inspire a change of heart that is wholly positive. Estranged family and friends, for example, will often put aside their disagreements and reconcile with each other in the last moment of a loved one’s life. A good death can even inspire faith where it was once absent.
To be sure, not all deaths are good deaths. Many people—including many Orthodox Christians—meet death with fear, anger, or despair. And rather than being a moment of reconciliation, these deaths inspire animosity, jealousy, and envy, and even extinguish faith.
Thinking about Abba Agatho and those whose deaths I observed, I find myself forced to conclude that I will die as I have lived. I will die as I live because, as Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas points out, the human person is not moving toward death, I am not a “being-toward-death” as Heidegger would have me think but rather because death comes to me and when it does, it strips me of my illusions, my little or not-so-little acts of self-conceit.
Or, as the Psalmist reminds us
His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; In that very day his plans perish (Psalm 146:4, NKJV).
Agatho and all those whose death reflects the death of Christ on the Cross, die as they do because they realize that the whole of life—including death—is not a project to be completed but a gift to be received. This does not, as Agatho’s life of vigilance suggests, preclude plans and projects If anything, to see my life as a gift inspires me a desire to work harder, not to earn God’s love but in thanksgiving for His love.
Gratitude, in other words, is what inspires a good death because gratitude is the source of humility. And, as Chesterton puts the matter, humility is a matter of “holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that everyone has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious.” He goes on to say
Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity.
Humility, like death, also spoils my illusions about it. Where I think it means to go about dressed in rags, with head hung down,
Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world (Heretics. p. 71).
Agatho and all those who receive death as a dear friend, all share a common trait: they are humble and so “not merely too good for this world,” but also “too practical for this world.”
This is why they meet death as a friend; they know they have no lasting place in this life but only in their One, True, and Best Friend Jesus Christ. It is in meeting Christ that, finally, the soul receives its proper garment. Or rather, it is in death that the soul realizes the beauty it received at baptism when they were clothed in Christ.