My dear 80-year old Jesuit colleague, Father Daniel Kendall, passed away in the middle of last night peacefully at 2:30 am. The Night of Memorial Day, Tuesday, May 26. He was in good health, swimming long laps most days for decades. His retirement had just been announced twelve days ago. His death was utterly unexpected, as he seemed to have years left at first glance. A dear friend, Lois, who let me know early this morning, noted that he had a tremendous capacity to be delighted in seeing you, almost giggling as his eyes rested on you. The last time I saw him, some months ago, a few weeks before the quarantine, I had run into him in our department office. Neither of us had any idea that that would be the last time we would set our eyes upon each other. He was the same, jovial self he had always been.

But who knows when their exact moment of death will come? There are supposedly Jain mendicants and Hindu sages whose sign of their intense wisdom is knowing their exact moment of death, or at least their final day, before which they will have called their disciples to visit and see him or her one last time. But I am not sure if this is just hearsay, or if it really ever happened, though I had heard many friends in India relate to me first-hand accounts of such a phenomenon, as if this kind of event was rare, but not impossible.

W. S. Merwin, a renowned poet, and also a dear friend, sang out in a poetic reflection about how every year every one of us who is still alive pass unknowingly our day of death, our death anniversary, unconcerned, innocent of the meaning of the future of that very day. I remembered William’s poem today. Here it goes:

For the Anniversary of My Death

By W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
…As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

W.S. Merwin, “For the Anniversary of My Death” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 1993)  From The Poetry Foundation. 

How do we keep our own impending, not knowing which exact day it will be, death in mind as we conduct our everyday lives? How do we keep our collective human death in mind, not knowing which exact day it will be, as we conduct our everyday lives? Who are we in relation to the perennial specter of death, whether of the individual kind or the collective kind? How will each one of us be remembered? What will be forgotten about us? I remember my father, nearly seven years ago, asking his three daughters circled around his deathbed, “How long will you remember me? What will you remember of me?”

***

An ancient concept within Hinduism, seen in the light of current climate chaos, is especially revealing to me. It is the concept of the four ashramas, the four stages of life.

The Dharmasashtra states that there are four stages of life. Though in ancient times, it was limited to a few, I wonder what would happen if we were inspired to live now according to this precept. If a full life, conceived metaphorically at 80 years old, a thousand moon life, can be divided into four stages, and if each life stage lasts 20 years, then these four life stages are characterized by the lifestyle of the student, the householder, the forest dweller, the wandering ascetic.

The student is to live in a collective household with a guru, or a sacred teacher, to do labor that keeps the whole school going, like a co-op, sweeping, cooking, cleaning, sorting, cutting vegetables and fruits, sharing what is there amongst its members, and keeping the learning of its students at its center throughout.

The householder is the only stage of life that is allowed to make money; its express purpose was to help create the habitus for the family to reproduce itself, to set up literally a house; a householder was, therefore, a holder of a house. It was, to be, though, a temporary holding. Most importantly, he was also to carry financially the other three stages who are at different stages of life than the householder. The life of the householder was limited to the time of reproducing the family and the purpose of the making money was not to just support the individual household, but also to support the other three stages of life, of many, many others, of the lives in the broader fabric of the community. 

There was an arc to materiality, it had a beginning, middle, and end. Material desires were not conceived as potentially infinite, as they are now and with all the consequences that that infinity applies on a finite earthly abode.

The forest dweller resembles what we may call retirement, a simplification of life, of giving away your possessions to the next generation.  Living in the forest is another form of collective life, of cooking and eating and working together in community, within the confines of a circle of forest huts, of a willful, chosen simplicity, circumscribed within the horizon of a liberating enoughness.

The wandering ascetic was considered the biggest challenge of all the four stages of life and it was considered to be an almost impossible goal to reach, limited to the rare and spunky and focused.

The express purpose of the three of the four stages of life, sixty years out of the eighty years, or three quarters of this mythical life was not to make lots of money, but rather to learn, to live simply in the forest with enough, or to wander with few belongings, actively searching for spiritual wisdom. This was all of their express purpose. Living as a householder under the canopy of the four stages of life naturally limits our material desires to this one stage of life.

Father Dan Kendall, a Jesuit priest, a university professor for nearly forty-five years, a colleague and friend, who welcomed me into the department of Theology/Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, over two decades ago, was an extraordinary man. He, by choosing to be a Jesuit at a young age, extended his student life stage. By becoming a priest, he skipped the householder stage and went straight to the third stage, of living in a Jesuit community for most of his life, akin to the ancient Hindu forest hermitage. In some ways, he was shy, reserved even, but his life speaks now much bigger than words could ever say. May we never forget a life lived with such sweetness, light, and simplicity.  May it help us model our own, both individually and as a collective vision of an enoughness. May we, too, have the strength, courage, and conviction to live under a rubric of a deep lightness of materiality, a vision we are more in need of every single day as we move forward to our own unknown, potential shadows of the future, with the possible effects of too muchness.