Monday, Day 16: Carnation

In high school our youth group spent the night at church on Holy Thursday, taking turns holding vigil at the foot of the cross, where an icon of Jesus was nailed. On Friday morning, we would participate in an intimate morning service, then help the women of the church decorate the Epitaphion or tomb of Christ. The Epitaphion was like a huge, wooden table with a dome above it, and it was always decorated with carnations—blood-red and white.

At the 3:00 service, Jesus’ body was removed from the cross and placed in the Epitaphion, and at the end of the service, we kissed his body, then knelt before it and crawled beneath it to signify our own willingness to die with him.

One year, I froze when I got underneath the Epitaphion, overwhelmed by the scent of polished wood and the fresh, almost minty scent of the carnations. I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t actually want to die. I don’t know what made me take the whole ordeal so literally that year—but I was truly panicked.

I heard a voice tell me to breathe in and out three times. To this day, I’m not sure if the person in line behind me told me to do this, or if it was a voice that came from somewhere else—either way, I did what the voice said. I breathed deeply, in and out, three times, then crawled out the other end.

That night at 7:00, as we sang the funeral dirges—the most beautiful songs I know—and walked in a long procession with candles around the church. I felt an inexplicable lightness. It was a beautiful, warm evening, one of the first of the year.

When the altar boys held up the Epitaphion so we could walk beneath it one last time, I realized that things were getting easier. We were moving slowly toward the Resurrection.

At the end of the evening service, the priest hands out the carnations on the Epitaphion until it is bare again. We take the carnations to our iconostasis at home, where we pray. We are supposed to burn it when it begins to turn brown.

I admit I didn’t always burn my carnation. But one year, in college, I decided to do so. I took a clay pot out onto the small patch of green in front of my dorm and lit the dead flower on fire. Black smoke—way more than I had expected--billowed around me, smelling at first like ordinary smoke. But then there was a sputter, and suddenly I smelled the fresh, mint-like scent of the carnation when it had been alive. Somewhere in the dead cells of that plant, that scent had remained, waiting for the fire to let it loose.

I scattered the ashes beneath a nearby tree, but the scent lingered for days on my jacket. I felt like I was carrying around a tangible story about death and rebirth, one I couldn’t fully understand.

Some 20 years later, I’ve been through enough death and rebirth cycles to at least sort of get it. We fall off our bikes and have to bandage up our torn-open skin, replace the tire that somehow folded in on itself. We fail a class and have to retake it. We write a grant, don’t get it, try again. We lose a job, find another one. We get bad news about our health or someone else’s. We celebrate when treatments work, grieve when they do not.

We know this narrative, and yet we never fail to resist it, to cuss or shake our fists or weep when no one is looking. We don’t want to have to go through it again, to have to kneel down and crawl beneath all of that unpleasant sorrow, no matter how we have tried to pretty it up.

We forget that it is the most ancient and inescapable narrative, as well as the only narrative every human being has in common. If we would only honor the story, we would notice when the Epitaphion had been lifted above our heads. Suddenly, rather than crawling, we’re just crouching slightly to get under it. How did that happen?

If we would honor the story, we would notice that even when we have to burn away whatever we had to lose, its essence—that part of it that is lasting, that has sometime to teach us—remains like a faint scent clinging to our clothes.

If we would pay attention, we would realize how deeply we are all connected to each other, in the same funeral procession that always has the same end.