Prayers From the Edge of Goodbye
This is the fourth post in the Becoming series. In this series, I’m walking with some of the church mothers and fathers, not as dusty museum pieces or theological trivia, but as companions for grief, calling, healing, courage, ordinary faithfulness, and the long road of being formed by Jesus.
This week, I want to sit with Macrina the Younger.
I love Macrina. I remember reading about her in Church History, although to be fair, her brothers were the bigger deal in the class (*sigh* modern day version of the ‘he-man-woman-haters club. If you know, you know.). Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa got the spotlight, as they often do, but I went down the rabbit hole to learn more about their big sister. And once I did, I could not stop thinking about her.
Macrina was born into a family that would shape the life of the early church in profound ways. Her brothers Basil and Gregory became major theologians, pastors, and defenders of the faith, but Macrina was not merely “their sister,” as if that was the whole of her contribution. She was a student of Scripture, a spiritual leader, a teacher, an ascetic, a founder of a Christian community, a woman whose life helped form the faith and calling of her family, and a theological voice preserved through the writings of Gregory.
According to Gregory’s The Life of Macrina, her mother, Emmelia, taught her Scripture from the time she was young. She studied portions of Scripture that many would have assumed were too deep for a child, including the Wisdom of Solomon, especially the portions with ethical teaching. She also knew the Psalms deeply. Gregory describes the Psalter as her constant companion, with her as she woke, worked, ate, rested, and prayed in the night.
There are also stories about Macrina that carry the feel of holy lore, as many stories of women, servants, and hidden faithful ones in church history often do. Gregory tells of her mother having a dream before Macrina’s birth, connecting her to Thecla, a legendary early Christian woman known for devotion and courage. He also includes stories of healing connected to Macrina’s prayer and faith. We can hold those stories with humility, not flattening them into either “this absolutely happened exactly this way” or “this is useless because it sounds too wondrous.” Sometimes lore carries the love, memory, and witness of a community trying to say, “This life showed us Christ.”
Macrina did not live an easy life. Then again, who did in the 300s? Her father arranged a marriage for her when she was young, but her betrothed died before they ever made it to the altar. Rather than marry someone else, Macrina chose a life of devotion to Christ. Gregory says she considered the man promised to her not dead, but absent, alive to God because of the hope of resurrection.
That detail catches me every time.
Macrina also promised to stay with her mother, and together they eventually formed a life of prayer, simplicity, shared work, and Christian community. She helped lead her mother away from the status and comforts of their earlier life and toward a household where servants and women of different social places were treated as sisters. That may sound sweet to modern ears, but in the fourth century, that was not a small thing. Macrina was not just pious in a private corner. Her theology became a way of life that re-ordered a household.
She shaped people. She shaped a community. She shaped her brothers. In Gregory’s On the Soul and the Resurrection, written after Basil’s death, Gregory presents Macrina as “the Teacher.” He comes to her in grief, and she becomes the one who steadies him, reasons with him, and teaches him about the soul, death, and resurrection. I do not want us to miss that. One of the great theologians of the early church wrote himself as the student at the feet of his dying sister.
The line from Macrina that has stayed with me comes from her deathbed prayer, recorded by Gregory in The Life of Macrina. As she prayed near the end of her life, she said, “You have made the end of this life the beginning of true life.”
There is something about those words.
They have been with me in this current hard season of reflection, self-examination, and reckoning. This has been a season of looking at unhealed wounds and unestablished boundaries, of taking back thoughts, feelings, and emotions I had given away under the false belief that surrendering them was required of me. It has been a lot. And yet, I want to become the healthiest version of myself that I can be as I run the final miles of this earthly life.
When I read Macrina’s words, I’m reminded that Christian hope is not an escape from death. It is a different way of seeing it. Not less painful. Not less holy. Not less mysterious. But different.
I remember the day my friend’s mom died back in 2012. She had lived a hard life, a really hard life, and those final months held experiences that filled both my friend and me with trauma we would later have to navigate. I remember the day she went into hospice, although I had no idea then how hospice would come back into my own life five years later.
She was never really lucid, but she responded to The Beatles playing on the speaker. I remember all of us in the room, her longtime pastor on speaker phone, and we were laughing and remembering while everyone kept talking. Then something shifted in the room. Even writing that makes the hair stand up on my arms.
I could not put my finger on what it was, but I looked over and watched her chest for a while. Then I touched my friend’s arm to interrupt her and said, “She’s gone.” Even in the deep pain of my friend’s broken heart, there was life in the room. I did not have words for it then, but I never doubted God was there.
Fast forward five years to the week leading up to PJ’s death. We were in the same hospice as five years before, in the room next door. You would think that would have rattled me, but it didn’t. It was the first time I became acutely aware of the holiness surrounding death, especially the death of a Christ-follower.
Of course there was pain. Of course there was sorrow. At first there was an incredible sense of dread when we realized that not only were we placing PJ on hospice, but his pain would not allow us to bring him home. That meant his physical pain could be eased, but ours was just beginning.
And yet, from that first night through the following eleven days, there was peace in that building. His friends came in and brought the X-box. They played games, sang worship songs, and prayed. His best friend from boyhood slept in the recliner next to him most nights. There was sadness in the room, but there was also peace.
The night PJ died, his dad was beside him, Ruth walked into the building moments after, and my parents and I rushed over with Liam, somehow thinking we would still get to say goodbye. The brain cannot comprehend time in moments like that. I remember being anxious and overwrought, feeling like my insides were literally crumbling. But as soon as we walked into the room, there was peace.
I think hospice nurses know what this is, even if not all of them would name it the same way.
It was in that room, knowing PJ was no longer in that battered shell of a body, while we sang worship songs, prayed, cried, and answered the curious questions of a three-year-old, that something became clear to me. When someone we love dies, and we are there beside them in the days, hours, or minutes before, we are brought as close as possible to the veil between earth and heaven. The Spirit is there, leading all. We can hold their hands and walk with them only so far.
And then our fingers slip out of touch.
As they take their last breath here, they inhale their first breath there, with Jesus.
Tuesday will mark one year since we walked my mom right up to that veil, and our hands slipped apart once again. And once again, there was peace in the room. Not easy peace. Not painless peace. Not peace that erased the grief. But peace that witnessed to something larger than death.
This is why Macrina’s words matter so much to me. “You have made the end of this life the beginning of true life.” That sentence holds something a person cannot understand without God, and maybe cannot fully experience without walking in the holy, sacred space that surrounds dying.
Theology is not only written in books. Sometimes theology is lived at bedsides. Sometimes it is whispered through tears. Sometimes it sounds like worship songs in a hospice room. Sometimes it looks like answering a child’s questions while your heart is broken. Sometimes it is the steady witness of a woman like Macrina, praying resurrection hope as her own body is failing.
Jesus said to Martha, as she stood in her grief over Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26) That question is not asked in a classroom. It is asked near a tomb. It is asked in the ache of loss. It is asked in the place where faith has to become more than an idea.
Do you believe this?
I think that question comes to many of us at the bedside. It comes when the machines are quiet, when the room shifts, when the hand we were holding slowly becomes still. It comes when grief presses on our chest and we have to decide whether resurrection is something we merely affirm, or something that can hold us when the person we love has crossed where we cannot follow yet.
Paul gives us words for that hope in 1 Corinthians 15. He writes that one day this corruptible body will be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body will be clothed with immortality. Then death will be swallowed up in victory. “Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?” That does not mean death does not sting now. Anyone who has loved and lost knows it does. But Paul is telling us that death’s sting is not eternal, and death’s victory is not final.
That is the difference.
Death is real, but it is not ultimate. Grief is real because love is real. Grief is deep and lasting, because that love is deep and lasting. Hope is real because Jesus is risen.
Macrina helps me see that the edge of goodbye can also be holy ground. Not because death is good. Death is an enemy. Scripture calls it that. But because Christ has entered death, broken its power, and turned the end of this life into the beginning of true life for those who belong to Him.
So maybe Macrina is a companion for all of us who have stood in hospice rooms, hospital rooms, bedrooms, or quiet corners where goodbye came too soon or too slowly. Maybe she is a companion for those of us learning that grief and faith are not opposites. Maybe she is a companion for those of us trying to become whole while still carrying the ache of those we miss.
Her life reminds me that women have always carried theology in their bodies, homes, prayers, communities, and words, even when history remembered them mostly through the pens of men. Her deathbed prayer reminds me that resurrection hope is not fragile. It can stand at the edge of goodbye and still speak.
And her witness reminds me that peace in the room is not imaginary.
It is the nearness of Christ.
You might like other posts from this series:
Intro: Beauty in the Bruise
Part 1: When Restlessness is Really Homesickness
Part 2: All Shall Be Well: Even Here
Part 3: Shaken But Not Overcome
Part 4: Prayers From the Edge of Goodbye
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
