Grace of the Spadeful
Early this morning, I was reading about a monastic tradition that, at first glance, seems rather macabre. In certain communities, a monk would go out each day and dig just a few spadefuls of earth, eventually forming the grave in which he would be buried. It sounds severe. Even a little dark.
But this act wasn’t an anxious fixation on the end. It was an exercise in mortal clarity.
Saint Benedict urged his monks to keep death daily before their eyes. Not as a morbid command, but as a call to freedom. When we truly grasp in our bones that our time here is a gift with a limit, the anxieties that weigh us down begin to lose their hold. We begin to see more clearly what matters and what doesn’t.
For the Christian, the grave is not a pit of despair but a threshold. Saint Paul speaks with striking confidence: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). In Christ, death has been emptied of its finality. He has turned the end into a beginning.
Even without a shovel in our hands, we are invited to dig. We are called to strip away the illusion of permanence and to surrender all things to Christ. This does not diminish the beauty of life. It transfigures it. Every breath becomes a grace. Every moment, an invitation to surrender.
© 2026 Lawain McNeil. All rights reserved