Casket-making 101
Marcus Daly, Founder of Marian Caskets, demonstrates the craft
Casket-making 101
— 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.
Notice how he cradles the skull gently as he and death stare into each-other’s eyes dead-on. The exemplar of humility, Francis’ eyes are turned toward the earth (gravely yet in peace) while the open sockets of the skull point the way, we all hope, up toward our heavenly homeland. The only path up to immortality with God is by facing down into the consequences of our mortality.
Here, the meek essence of Francis is captured perfectly by the patched and tattered habit and the cord dragging on the ground. Note the juxtaposition of this image to the previous one, which is no less true of the saint; on his knees, Francis compresses the skull onto his chest with firmly clasped hands. The light from his right side illuminates only a portion of his face, his bedraggled habit, and his tense hands. His wondrous gaze turns toward the heavens along with the skull’s, and his open mouth catches him in fervent prayer, perhaps even his famous Canticle, wherein he sings, “Praised be You, my Lord,
through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no living man can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.”
This is not the Francis of the saccharine Sunday School stories. This is the real deal. Best to consider the end from day one.
For all that, this last image of St. Francis in our hallway burns still brighter in my mind.
The bronze captures his emaciated intensity, the hand almost skeletal from the rigors of asceticism and loss of health. His wrinkled, wind-beaten faced is hooded by the equally rumpled habit. Every walk past this glass-encased statue in the hallway arraigns me before the Just Judge, accuses me of taking life and grace for granted, and reminds me of the first death by nature I cannot avoid, and the second death by grace I can.
We celebrate the 800th anniversary of Francis’ death and birth into heaven on October 4th of this year, and Pope Leo XIV has decreed 2026 the Jubilee year of St. Francis. According to his decree, anyone who visits St. Francis of Assisi Church on the campus of San Damiano College is eligible for a plenary indulgence.
If you’ve been waiting for a reason to visit San Damiano College for the Trades and its awe-inspiring, majestic church, I’m not sure what better reason there could be! Consider this my personal invitation to all you friends of the College and prospective parents and students to come see what we’re up to here. More importantly, come to be reminded of the four last things, so to better make all the first things first!
Apply now for fall 2026
Students are already lining up! Get in your application for next year.
We invite you into this mission to restore the dignity of work and rebuild the Church! Resolve now to give 10% of your annual tithe to share in rebuilding God’s Church as a tax-deductible donation.
San Damiano College for the Trades, 4879 Laverna Road, Springfield, IL, 62707, United States
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