— The End is in the Beginning —Do you remember your freshman year college “orientation week”?If it was anything like mine, you were oriented to a series of parties (on a sliding scale of debauchery), a stream of “ice-breakers” and sessions introducing rules, safety protocols, and academic advising followed by handy tips for what to do if your roommate has his girlfriend sleep over, and promises of “the places you’ll go” with your high-flying major. The orientation dimmed my bright eyes and gloomed my eager demeanor. What had I just signed up for? A four-year edutainment vacation and passport to corporate success?!What kind of meaningful end could I have expected from an education that had such a meaningless beginning? Better ends for higher education require better beginnings. How’s this for an idea: What if you began your College life spending two weeks making custom caskets, carving the divine mercy prayer into its oak sides and fashioning an inlaid cross on the lid? What if the smell of wood dust and the sound of hammers on pegs replaced the odor of alcohol and the noise of demonic music? What if the rhythm of sanding smoothed the way for the interior silence necessary for an encounter with God? What if the serious reality of meditating on death with your new friends around a fire in the evening replaced “ice-breakers?” What if no false promises and delusions of grandeur were offered, only the perennial counsel to keep death ever before one’s eyes? Welcome to San Damiano College for the Trades fall 2026 orientation! We’re partnering with master craftsman Marcus Daly, founder of Marian Caskets, to offer an integrated orientation to life, death, and casket-making. What’s more, Daly plans to hire San Damiano students in the fall to work in the shop he is opening up in Springfield. At the physical level, students will encounter the excitement and, yes, the tediousness, of what it really takes to make something beautiful. At the spiritual level, students will spend time reflecting with myself, our faculty, and Daly on texts that touch death. As providence would have it, just as we were dreaming up this new course, a friend of mine who had no idea this was in the making forcefully put a book in my hands and said, “you have to read this!” It was Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell. Williams was a close friend of C.S. Lewis, whose book Til We Have Faces, has always been my favorite meditation on death. Williams’ book, however, has haunted me these last weeks, ever since I came upon this passage where one of the characters considers the frightful prospect of death, wherein she could no longer hide from herself the truth about herself. she would undergo a fearful, terrible, “permanent revelation”: “the spirit of a man at death saw truly what he was and had been, so that whether he desired it or not a lucid power of intelligence manifested all himself to him.” This character goes on to consider the possibility that our manners of keeping distant from death have been efforts to prolong our intentional ignorance about ourselves, our attempt to run from the Greek philosophical dictum “know thyself” and the Christian vocation to “know love.” Beyond Williams’ tremendous insights, students will also consider Scripture and ponder poems such as Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” and Southwell’s “Upon the Image of Death.” Perhaps our greatest friend in this orientation toward and beyond death, however, is St. Francis of Assisi himself. We are San Damiano after all! Among the most powerful images of the saint shows him staring at a skull intently, inviting us into the depths of his constant preparation for God’s calling to account.
|
