Saint Death

Zero Saints limited edition hardcover, by Daniele Serra

Propers: Good Friday, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The fastest growing new religious movement on the planet is the literal worship of death.

I’ll grant that one must take such claims with a healthy grain of salt. So far as I can tell, every religious movement professes itself the fastest growing by some metric or another. Yet this one in particular has added 12 million devotees in just the last two decades, so the assertion has some chops.

They call her Santa Muerte, Saint or Holy Death, and her origins prove debatable at best. Her cult began in Mexico, but has spread at home and abroad. She is most aptly described as a folk saint, embraced by the masses of faithful, both Christian and pagan alike, though certainly not by the bishops. And while some hold her to be an angel or a deceased human being, most widely she is simply viewed as the personification of death.

The iconography is fascinating. Depicted as a skeleton, Santa Muerte often holds a scythe or an hourglass, symbols of death and of time, classical identifiers of the Grim Reaper. Yet she undeniably resembles Our Lady of Gaudelupe, the Marian apparition that converted Mexico. And then there are Aztec elements, recalling Mictēcacihuātl, the goddess of death and the dead. The result is a striking composite figure to say the least.

Some would claim that her cult is pagan, an underground holdover from before the Conquistadors. I am more persuaded by those who would point to Spanish Holy Week processions, when the skeletal personification of death would be wheeled out on a cart in Christian parade, representing Good Friday, the Cross and carven Tomb. But then, death is universal, so in some sense she’s always been here.

As a twenty-first-century goddess and saint, Santa Muerte’s fame appears to spring from her reputation for miracles and magic—as well as from her nonjudgmental, which is to say amoral, approach to worship and devotion. Santa Muerte doesn’t judge. She accepts narcos, prostitutes, sicarios, nightshift cabbies, cops, anyone who has to deal with death; which is all of us, really. Jesus accepts us all, then tells us to go and sin no more. Santa Muerte doesn’t give a damn.

Ever since seminary, I’ve been fascinated by the figure of Santa Muerte, and not just because I’m a sucker for Halloween. There’s always been a spooky side to Christianity. Go and take a gander at any pre-Reformation cathedral. It’s all memento mori and danse macabre. Heck, our primary symbol of faith is an instrument of execution. We tend to forget it because it’s so common, but a crucifix is a horror, the murder of Man and of God.

But we look at all that as the past, whereas the cult of Santa Muerte is very much the present. You can find her in just about every major American city. Over Thanksgiving, I purchased a novena candle to Santa Muerte at a thrift store in rural Fairmount, MN. We’re forever being told that reason rolls back the tide of religion, that science has overcome faith. Yet just the opposite is true. As organized religion wanes, so does faith in reason: we don’t trust scientific authority any more than we do ecclesiastic.

And here comes Santa Muerte, bowling over boundaries, linking Christian and criminal, pious and pagan, north and south, east and west. She offers miracles and magic, blessings and curses, an unapologetically amoral spirit for an unapologetically amoral age. Yet there is beauty in her. How else would she be so accepted? How else would she be so revered? We still have to deal with death, each and all of us, the debt all men must pay. Our vaunted technology lets us pretend to put it off, but sooner or later every man jack one of us must meet her.

And we so desperately, deeply want her to be something beautiful, something loving, something good. We want the happy death, the blessed death, the crypt become our kingdom. And that is a Christian longing: the Christian profession that death has been defeated, the great nothing filled up by the Christ, transformed now to be our gate to eternal life. We can only ignore death for so long. After that we must either despair, or find faith. Because the truth is that either death negates everything, or something negates death.

Those are the only two options. The grave devours us all, or Someone devours the grave.

That’s what this night is about. That’s why we have the gall to call it Good Friday. Make no mistake: we murdered our God. We strung up an innocent Man and tortured Him to death. And it was the end of the world! Few knew it at the time. Yet there on the Cross was the Judgment. There the ruler of this world was driven out. Christ died at our hands and for our sake, died because He forgave us our sins as though He were our God. And He was! He is God from all eternity.

At the Cross we divided by zero. We committed the impossible crime. We murdered life itself, hated Love Himself, bound the Infinite, ended the Eternal, cast our Creator into hell, the All into the nothingness of the abyss. And there He conquered! There He filled up death and hell to bursting with the life and love, the Spirit and truth, the Body and Blood of our God. He turned our whole world inside-out and upside-down. Most of us didn’t notice due to the banality of evil: just one more corpse on a cross. And yet upon that Cross, death itself has died.

God did not make death. She has no substance, no form. She is simply the lack of life, the vacuum and the void. But I wonder now whether she hasn’t been given a certain reality; called out, as are we all, from nothingness unto pleroma; her true form, true purpose, revealed as transformation, a sloughing off of dross, a rebirth into glory. Thus could St Francis of Assisi sing of her on his deathbed:

Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape … Blessed are those whom Sister Death will find in your most holy will, for the second death can do them no harm.

There is a Santa Muerte, a good and holy death. We can quibble about forms of devotion, personification, and especially immorality. But we have all been Baptized, into Christ’s own death and Resurrection: into Jesus’ death, that we need never fear death again, and into His eternal life, already here begun. Jesus Christ has conquered death and raised us evermore. So when we must greet the Bony Lady, we go in friendship, not in fear.

Christians worship not Saint Death, but the One who raises the dead.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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