Ash Wednesday: The OG Death Café

Last night,The Candler Foundry hosted its second “death café”: a candid discussion—open to the public—about death. In a local coffee shop, we ate cake (a nonnegotiable of death café protocol) and talked about mortality. We planned this intentionally a few days after Ash Wednesday, the holy day of reflecting on human mortality as an act of worshipping God. In many ways, Ash Wednesday is the original Christian death café.

Now, death cafés are not expressly theological. No one needs to profess faith or religion of any kind to join in as death visits the religious and nonreligious alike.And what is interesting is that many people who participate claim that religion does not often (or often enough) make space for honest conversations about death.

Now, a few months ago, this blog featured a three-part series on the many biblical perspectives about death itself and the afterlife. Now, I want to explore why it is our theological responsibility to talk about, think about, and acknowledge death. And we can look to Scripture for inspiration.

First, acknowledging death as reality for everyone reminds us of our creatureliness. Like oak leaves and elephants, we humans are part of the created world. In our intelligence and accomplishment, we sometimes trick ourselves that we order life and death, that we have discovered and invented so much to further life that we might avoid death altogether. Thus, we fail to acknowledge God’s sovereignty.

In fact, in the second creation story (Gen 3:22-23), God mentions that humans were not created to live forever! To die and to accept death is part of our created nature (Heb 9:27). In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is depicted as the ideal, perfect human being—the human being as it was designed by God. The way Jesus ultimately demonstrates this is by being obedient and faithful to God even unto death.

Second, accepting and addressing death as a fact of life rather than an anomaly eases the pain of others. My husband has been a social worker in hospice and palliative care for many years. The most painful stories he shares are the ones where families refuse to acknowledge death as inevitable and so prolong the misery and suffering of one they claim to love. Many physicians fail to adequately prepare patients and families for death because death is considered failure on a hospital record. And so many families experience extra grief and hardship during bereavement by not having openly talked about and planned for death. When Isaiah describes the mandate of God’s people—“to bind up the brokenhearted”—it means to ease suffering rather than amplify it. Our refusal to allow honest conversations about mortality creates heartbreak rather than alleviates it.

In one of The Candler Foundry’s TheoEd Talks, Mike McArgue recalls his experience with suicidal ideation and notes that if people want to help prevent suicide, they must first become comfortable talking about death (you can watch it here). If you haven’t accepted your own mortality, he argues, you cannot offer hospitality to someone else’s struggles with life and death.

Third, accepting death means putting trust in God’s care. Psalm 139 praises an inescapable God, who remains present even when we lie down in our graves. If we are people who claim to believe in resurrection, in God’s eternal love, andGod’s unshakeable presence, then contemplating our own mortality is the homework for learning and practicing true faith.

Fourth, accepting death as a fact not a mere possibility, openly discussing it, and planning for it with loved ones strengthens our communal identity and reminds us that we belong to a large divine family (1 Cor 12:12-13). Trusting others to care for our bodies after death, to carry out our wishes, and to faithfully portray our legacies turns us back to an interdependence on each other that our faith insists upon.

Finally, keeping death before us steers our lives. When we actively consider our mortality and the short time we are allotted here on earth, it guides us towards investing our time and energy in things that truly matter. The ApostlePaul captures this in his farewell to Timothy: “…the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness…” (2 Tim 4:6-8)

The words spoken on Ash Wednesday are true for every human being: “remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”