A friend sent me a YouTube video of a performance of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s Second Symphony. As far as I can recall, this performance was new to me. I found it a passable work, though nothing approaching the superlative language my friend used in describing it resonated with me. I do not know Scriabin’s music well, but I do rather like his Étude in D-sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 12, and here’s Horowitz masterfully rendering that.

But my differences in musical taste from my friend are not the point here.

His note got me looking into Scriabin’s biography, as I am wont to do with artists and thinkers generally. I discovered he was born on Christmas Day 1871 (though this date was changed some decades later when Russia moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1918). This immediately put me in a festive spirit. I thought “The perfect composer for the season, then!” and imagined listening to more of his music to help get me into the proper Christmas mood.

But as I continued reading, I came, all too abruptly, to his death. He died very suddenly, at age 43, of sepsis. This was only a matter of days after a splendid performance (he was a talented pianist in addition to his composing) at St. Petersburg which he described in ecstatic terms. He returned happily to his Moscow home and, in short order, an infected boil or cut on his upper lip had him bedridden with fever. In less than two weeks from the St. Petersburg concert at which he had been at the height of his expressive powers, Alexander Scriabin was dead.

My first thought here was that I had been mistaken about the congruity of my friend’s email about Scriabin’s symphony, the composer’s birthday, and the season in which we currently find ourselves. “What an awful tragedy!” I thought.

But, in truth, the Christmas season helps one think about both Scriabin’s birth and his death. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens characterizes the unique spirit of the season in this way: “[It is t]he only time I know of … when men and women … think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

How true. The spirit of the season, the love for our fellows that we are enjoined to cultivate, is intimately tied to our recognition that we share their fate, and they ours. We are all Alexander Scriabin.

Think about how urgent it all is.

Think of Scriabin as you walk about in your life during this blessed holiday season. Some number of people you pass on any given day are perhaps, all unknowing, now living in their final year. For some, it is months, weeks, perhaps only days away. They may be at the very pinnacle of life, full of confidence and energy and plans for a future that is not going to arrive.

Some number of people you pass on any given day in a moderately-sized city are likely to be suffering from a lethal cancer or heart condition or arterial blockage that is not yet diagnosed and causing no symptoms, but that will at some point in the weeks to come result in their passing.

Even the young and  healthy can be assured of no guarantees. A boyhood friend of mine died in an auto accident on the last day of what was our 8^th grade school year. He and I were both students in an English class that year that was our final class of the day. On the day of his death, we had talked in that class about our plans for the coming summer. The last thing I said to him before we left the classroom was a confident “See you later!” And I never did.

It is sobering to look at such a fate . Please recognize  this is not morbid thinking. It is what we are called to do in order to achieve the proper state of mind with respect to one another.

Every day, we are all passing dying people, and some of us in short order will take Scriabin’s place.

Again, I say, this is not mere melancholy or overwrought emotion. It is the truth, and recognizing it sets us free.

We necessarily bracket this truth from our consciousness much of the time in order to get about the business of the day. But coming back to it with regularity serves us well as a spiritual practice. What more effective way is there to prepare for this event we know is coming, though we know not when? And what better way to love our fellows than as Dickens’s fellow passengers to that common destination?

In the 23^rd chapter of Book I of The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis admonishes his readers to remember their deaths as the unpredictable certainty that it is: “If you ever saw any man die, remember that you must go the same way. In the morning, doubt whether you will live till night; at night, do not think yourself certain to live till morning. Be always ready … Remember how many have died suddenly and unprepared, for our Lord called them in the hour they least suspected His summons.”

Understand how quickly you will be forgotten on Earth at your death, Thomas à Kempis brutally reminds us, and do not idle away the minutes you have in foolishness, believing you will have all the moments you desire: “You are foolish if you think to live long, since you are not certain to live one day through to the end … Keep yourself as a pilgrim and a stranger here in this world, as one to whom the world’s business counts but little. Keep your heart free, and always lift it up to God, for you have here no city long abiding.”

How stunningly harsh a message, and yet it is the truest one imaginable.

This is the message too of Scriabin’s end. Live! Live as he did at that final concert, but with an understanding that it must pass. Love and pity that man or woman you pass today who is, without awareness, already trudging through the valley of the shadow of death, in just the way you would want her or him to love and pity you as you make that fateful walk. And be grateful to the God who reminds us every year, in this season of the coming of the Light into the world, that He is with us on that journey, and He has given us the way to its transcendence.