I once lay inside a coffin and listened to my friends describe my life as if I had already left it.

This was not a nightmare. It was a retreat exercise during my novitiate—deliberately arranged, entirely voluntary. Each of us took a turn. We climbed in, closed our eyes, and listened while our brothers spoke about us in the past tense: what we had given, what we had withheld, what kind of space we had made for others, or failed to make. When my turn came, I heard things that were kind, things that were accurate in ways I wished they weren’t, and one observation that I have never quite shaken loose—not because it was cruel, but because it was simply, plainly true.

One companion stayed in the coffin the entire afternoon. Nobody asked him to leave.

I have thought about that image many times since. A young man choosing to stay inside his own death, not from despair but from some deep need to let the truth settle before he climbed back out into ordinary life. There was something in that I recognised and something I found quietly frightening.

We are not as comfortable with honesty as we think.

Good Friday is supposed to be the most honest day in the Christian calendar. A man was executed. Friends........

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