The Passing of Darius Lecesne

My relationship with Darius is probably atypical of many I met at the hospital. We didn't attend Church together and we didn't agree on theological matters. We were men who were friends. Even if he had renounced his beliefs I would have been his friend.
What I loved about Darius is that he knew that God in his infinite wisdom did not create us all to to be holy in the same way. Darius was a gentle man, a man who knew better than to play with fire, whereas I will stand in a conflagaration to see what it's like. Darius gave respect to the reality that we each had roles to play in this world and that none was more valuable than another.

While many remember Darius's faith most strongly, this is not what I loved about the man. I loved Darius the man-a big, goofy, naive, innocent with a joyous laugh who loved to run. I remember the delight he took in listening to me rant and how he always saw that behind coarseness, a radical dislike for those who claimed to know the ineffable, we were both searchers, seekers after that which moves the Great Blessing.

Often Darius infuriated me and I'm certain he felt the same way about me. Yet, we remained friends because we loved each other. Just because we didn't agree about theological matters was of no concern. We agreed that life was precious, Creation was beautiful, each breath was a Blessing, that there was a reason for each individual to shine the light of the Creator in his own way.

Darius was more than a holy man. He was a good man, a friend who could tolerate my infernal foul mouth, and a human striving to be whole.

As my son said in his infinite twelve year old wisdom, "Our lives are forever altered."

Darius and I were in touch for a while via mail, having been recommended to one another by a mutual friend, and we met on a few occasions. I still have many of his letters, written in their unique style, chock-full of quotes from various philosphers and theologians, making passionate points in frequently colorful (if at times rather dense and opaque) language. While we never knew one another that well, I find myself shocked and saddened by his loss. I admire the hell out of how he lived his life, as a devoted husband and father and as a man of faith and conviction. Now a husband and a father myself, and one who frequently wrestles with faith-related questions, I am humbled indeed by the example he set. My earnest and heartfelt prayers go out to the family he leaves behind.
--Andy Nowicki

I don't have much time to write, but I just want to let the Lecesne family know that we are praying for them. Rosaries and Masses are being offered for Darius, his wife, and children. Michelle and I are deeply shocked and saddend by the event. Joe, what you have written is very true; Darius was a unique, incredible guy. Because of our moving around we didn't get to know him as well as we would have liked, but what we knew of him was golden. We will cherish his memory and continue to pray for him and his family.

God Bless,
Daniel and Michelle

I want the world to know what a great loss this is and yet what a tremendous gain. While my heart is heavy with grief for Darius' wife, family and friends, I want anyone who is suffering now to know Saint Darius is available to hear your request for intercession.

(It is difficult for me to use past tense, so forgive me if I go back and forth)

My husband and I were fortunate to have spent precious time with Darius, Marianne and family just one week before Christmas after the baptism of their godson, Isaiah Joseph. On the way home that night, Joe and I were discussing "Darius the great". I asked Joe "Why do we talk so much when we're around him? He has so much wisdom, why does he never say 'Krista, please, be quiet and learn?'" He never did, he never would have.

Just a few random words that come to mind in thoughts of Darius Lecesne: devout, humble, quiet, strong, a gentle giant, loving, contemplative, honest, bold, truthful, patient, funny and fun loving, warm, full of life and in love with life, confident, wise (so wise), unselfish, a follower of truth.

When Darius spoke, his voice gently commanded attention. Anyone who knew Darius wanted to hear what he had to say. His thoughts, whether in conversation or on paper, were so profound. Just his presence made you want to be a more Godly person. Darius had the ability to call one to holiness without speaking those words directly at all. His love and devotion to Marianne and to their family was so completely evident. So much so that I often accidentally call them "Marius and Darianne" when speaking of them. I've never told either of them that, but I think it sums the love and the oneness they share.

I cherish the moments we were blessed to share with Darius, together with his family. I pray that we will be able to honor Darius and love his family as he would like us to. I pray the love of Christ will guide them and lift them up.

Though her heart is completely broken, Marianne has shown such strength and true grace, I am amazed by her. The devoted wife of Darius Lecesne has reminded me so much of our Blessed Mother. I cannot imagine the cross she carries but I am inspired by her character, by her faithfulness to God and her courage.

I am so grateful that just two weeks ago, I sent a note to Darius telling him how much Joe and I think of him and his family. I expressed to him that we thought him a living Saint. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for calling me to share those thoughts with Darius, thank you for delivering the note in time.

In memory of Darius, I will do my best to leave no words unspoken; to love, and visit often, Jesus in the Eucharist and to answer Christ's call to grow in holiness with every passing moment.

In closing, a quote from Blessed Mother Teresa:
"Holiness is not a privilege of the elect, but the duty of every Christian".

To that, I know my brother in Christ, Darius would say "Amen."

I would like to say a few things, for now, about Darius, though it will be hard. To say anything seems to me a kind of trespass, as if I were presuming to speak adequately about a man who could not be gainsaid by words, or of a friendship and a respect that was too intimate to be violated by outward expression. Words also sometimes threaten to dilute what we know. But I will say something, as Darius and I had talked many times before of how it pleases our Creator that we should try to hail with words and likenesses that which so far exceeds our expressions of it.

My first impression of Darius remains distinct in my memory, and it has remained intact, if only to be further buttressed by increasing intimacy with the man, all these years. When he first walked into the room, I had a somewhat disequilibriating reaction to his presence and behavior. For those of you who have had the advantage of reading C.S. Lewis's so-called "Space Trilogy," you will remember how Ransom's friend describes his first encounter with an angel. The angel appeared to him as a pillar of light. What was disconcerting about this pillar was that it seemed to be oriented to a frame of reference that had only the slightest correspondence to our own sense of terrestial space. In other words, it looked disturbing crooked, but only with reference to our world. When you took in your surroundings, the pillar seemed to be angled wrongly, towards an "upward" direction which you couldn't really indicate and which really only slightly corresponded to our sense of "up." However, when you concentrated on the pillar itself, instead of your surroundings, you realized with a horrible shock that it was the world that was crooked, along with everything in it, and that the pillar was more "straight" than the straightest thing in our world.

In that first encounter, Darius really only wanted to talk about God. He remarked to me one time of how, in Elie Weisel's recollection of being interviewed by the Catholic Francois Mauriac, Weisel complained about the fact that Mauriac was just "Jesus Christ this and Jesus Christ that." "That's how I want to be," Darius said. "When I lay down to die, I want them to say that Darius was just Jesus Christ this and Jesus Christ that." That's how Darius was in that first encounter. Years later, when I read about Lewis's idea of how angels appear to us, I was struck with Darius's orientation to the only real "up" or "straight," to which this world can offer no viable alternative. His tallness and vitality and health were no accident to the pillar-like presence he had, to me. Darius would appreciate what I am about to say, in that he appeared to me as I think an angel would: not some deformed diffusion of pseudo-love, but a concrete and at times flaming and furiously charitable presence of the at-first unsettling and only gradually re-centering certainty of God's love for us. He pointed violently and without fail in a direction that this fallen world seems to hardly understand. In stature, in deed, and in word, he pointed to God.

"He's not a tame Lion," and neither are his servants tame. Darius was on fire in action, deadly cold and unmoved in his certainty. The world broke itself on the man the way waves break on a seawall, and can only win in the end after much cost and even then only by sheer numbers. Against him, the futility of the world as self-sufficient was plain. Darius was qualitative, and not quantitative. (The sheer number and repetitious quality of his letters--I don't meana that in a bad way--reflected the fact that it was somehow natural that what he had to say was so important and so "big" that it could only be made manifest in massive quantity. His cup ran over, and it ran over with the One who is "the same, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.") He embraced the Spirit, in part because the Spirit included the real world; he refuted the world as being enough, because to choose the world is to have neither world nor Spirit, and the world so often wants to vie in our hearts for that place rightly belonging to the Spirit. I walked away from my first meeting with Darius, some fourteen years ago, somehow both deeply embarrassed at his monstrous inability to fit into this world, and deeply reassured that until that time, I had been simply wasting all of my time trying to fit in. The little good that I have to offer, I owe to him, and I wouldn't have had even that little bit of good had I never met the man. I have presumed for most of our friendship to call him a brother, when it reality he was more of a father, and I never knew it. I have not spent enough of my life trying match his heat and fervor.

I have never been one for these amorphous analogies of lights and peace in the heavenly paradise. I want to meet men there, like our fathers, and I want to be a man like those men. Marianne used to say that when Darius walked into a room, everyone in the room knew he was a man. Darius tought me to desire not less pleasure from God, but more. God, so much more. More than any man I have ever known, Darius (his namesake is no accident) walked, talked, and carried himself like the son of a King. He knew he had but a little bit of faithfulness to achieve, and devotion to responsibility and work, and he could receive the inheritance that so few men have the courage to live up to and take for their own. And in that sense, he was also a man constantly under siege. He fought like hell to make sure that the devil and his dominion could have no part of his inheritance. The devil might claim others, but all who were Darius's, so to speak, were to know, if he could convince them to see it, the insipid emptiness of the devil's wiles. His disappointment was at times profound. He was given to "paroxysms," a word that from the Greek is often translated as "troubled," when in reality it means little less than an implosion of unbridled fury. Why, after all, would men choose hell over heaven? And why did they work so hard to convince themselves that there was another alternative? If fighting like hell meant, for the moment, setting aside all dreams of glory and changing the baby's diapers, no warrior worthy of the title would refuse. Every letter, every diaper, every Mass, was a fight through to the Core that held all of reality intact for us--if we wanted it. Darius and I often talked about war, and the movie Gladiator. My father was a drill sargeant for the Air Cavs in Vietnam, where he saw action, and my grandfather was at Iwo Jima. Darius's father was in the European Theatre in the RAF, who perhaps, to Darius's delight, may have seen Lewis giving a lecture to the RAF during the War. And Darius's devotion to his father and his father's sacrifices put a shame on me regarding my relationship to my father which helped me reconcile with him after years of bitter distance. He used to say to me, "Only your father can tell you what it costs a man to live in this world," and he knew that fathers were sometimes as much chosen as they were inherited or given.

For now, and for myself, I do not exaggerate when I say that the central pillar has been removed, and the entire structure has been compromised to its foundations. I see more than I thought possible, the vanities and beauties of this world. St. Isaac the Syrian said that at any given moment, there must be at least one man who has fully realized God in his heart, walking the earth. For it is intolerable to suppose that the cosmos could continue to exist in which some part of God could be forgotten. And nothing can remember God in the cosmos more than a man. The cosmos (a "moving image of eternity") is kept from falling away, due to our remembrance of God. When such a man lives, it is as if, rather than bridging this fallen world to our true paradisal home of redeemed time, he pulls both of them together within himself. And is it so strange to think that it must be so? Darius's achievement of paradise has not so much moved him away as it has pulled heaven down to earth to redeem it, and to charge us with the undeniable reality that we are bound for God whether we like it or not. As St. Paul said, before we dabbled in the shadow of the heavenly things; now we have the heavenly things themselves. When the Old Testament prophets said, time and again, "Prepare ot meet your God," Darius knew that they were speaking of Christ coming to meet us, in the prison we could not escape, from which we could not yet know the Reality that the prison doors opened onto. Darius knew so well that heaven was more, not less, real than earth, more concrete; that all that we loved of earth and this life was lovable by virtue of the Paradise from which it came. Darius knew so well that we were made for heaven and redeemed earth--which is to say, our willful participation in the restitution of creation, in realization of what God, not we, want it to be. Darius has done this for me, and as Lewis said of his friend Charles Williams, "I am in wonder, not at what death did to him, but at what he did to death." I feel now more than ever before how you may delude yourself into thinking that you are just in this world; but to be anywhere is to be in God. You may accept that the only real act is to accept this with everything you do, or you may delude yourself into thinking that it is possible to deny it. "In Hades art Thou, too." After some forty hours of being tormented with having lost my friend, I was finally reassured of Darius's presence. We see through a glass darkly, and darkly I see Darius enthroned, in the halls of our faithful fathers, "practically perfect in every way," set to rule and love the much he has been given for being so faithful with little. It is intolerable (God, I hope it stays intolerable) that I should think of anything other right nowor ever, than of walking someday into that hall; and of being known by God, and by Darius, as a man. I know that Darius heard those words: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant.."

Andrew Lytle, I remember, asked Darius if it would be all right if he, Lytle, could pronounce Darius's name in the old style, as it was often read in Old Testament readings in the church: DarIus, not DARius. It was the way I liked to say his name whenever we were speaking of our calling to be men. He loved to talk about our responsibilities and the need for determination, and he loved to be reminded of it by the nobility of the men he called his fathers: his own father, Marion Montgomery, Andrew Lytle, et alia. I used to say--and it would make him laugh that hearty laugh of his--"that's right, DarIus." How many times have I said something to him primarily because it would allow me to hear that laugh of his?

Darius and I used to love to find small things in the Bible that, in the Greek and Latin, gave us greater insight into Christ. He called me up one day to tell me that he had found out that the Greek word for "dwelt," from the Gospel of John ("and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us"), originally meant "to nail tent spikes down." "Don't you see, Billy: He nailed his tent spikes down in His own flesh for us. He nailed Himself down for us, to permanently abide with us..." About a year ago, I found out that we get the word for "idiot" from the Greek "idios," which means simply "self." For the ancient Greeks, there seemed to be an idea that the "idiot" was a man who couldn't see anything outside of himself. When he would refer to pro-abortionists or atheistic liberals, Darius would say, "Yeah, well, they're 'idiots.' Right Billy?" And he would laugh that delighted laugh of his.

I did not mean to write so much, and I will stop now, wanting to say so much more, but for fear that words might dissolve this new resolution I feel, stronger than ever before, to try to be a man and to look forward to the Kingdom, oriented in a new way. My heart is broken, and still, and resolute.

"All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well."

Tobias (Billy)

I have so many memories of Darius, not because we had so many encounters but because every encounter with Darius was memorable. On one occassion we were talking about how much he enjoyed "fellowship" with Catholic families but even more so with Protestant families. I said, "Oh, so they could see that we weren't really so different?" Darius replied, "Noooo, so they can see how different we are, how our joy is not founded in this world." Another time I decided to ask him how he did "it". The "it" being home schooling and household chores, specifically laundry. I had discussed and complained about laundry with many of my home schooling mommy-friends and the general concensus was we all greatly disliked laundry. So I asked Darius, who replied, "I just put it in and take it out, put it in and take it out." How sweet it was to see him with his kids. I laugh every time I think of him saying "Lay your headie down", or very calmly "Marianne, where is that tubie?" I always liked to watch him when Marianne told a story because no matter how many times he heard the story he listened attentively and laughed heartily. The love he had for her shone in his eyes. They are a beautiful picture of the Sacrament of Marriage. I pray that we may all love our spouse as freely and completely as Marianne and Darius. I pray that our ever-faithful Lord will overwhelm her with His peace, that Aaron, Jacob, Hannah, Rachel, Mary and Rebekah will know the joy their father found in them and that they will always turn to God our Father as the source of all consolation and joy in their life. I pray that all the dreams D and M have for their children will be realized, especilly that of eternal life. Jesus, I trust in you.

Though I only had the privilege of knowing him for a couple of years, Darius was a great many things to me. At all times, he was an unwavering encourager. Be it his great, big smile, a firm handshake, a chat after mass, a telephone call, or one of his unique cards, Darius always encouraged me and all those he met to seek that which was good and worthy in God’s eyes. Darius was also an example of true discipleship by truly putting into practice and defending the Catholic Faith he believed and loved. Among many things, Darius often received the sacraments, witnessed to the truth at our parish’s meetings and activities, preached by both his words and actions respect and love for all human life, instructed the ignorant, and gave counsel to the doubtful. Through his love for both Marianne and the kids, teaching his children both the Faith and knowledge of this world, his firm discipline, his overflowing generosity, Darius was an example to me of true Christian fatherhood. Darius was a true friend, who really cared about the salvation of my soul. Lastly, Darius was an excellent runner, who ran the good race up to his last breath.

Joachim

Eulogy for Darius Lecesne
January 16, 2006

Darius Lecesne. Who can forget his great head above a room full of people? That noble head. The head of an African prince. Some of us knew him briefly. Some twenty years. Marianne, too briefly longer. His mother knew him 46 years. Too short a time still. Only God Almighty has always known Darius, though we all feel that way today, and can hardly imagine the world without him. He was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary courage to be a good disciple, and he gave ordinary people the courage to try to be.

But today is about the cross. Marianne can testify to us all the death of human words. The only words of any use today are the ones that will raise the dead. As we have just heard, THOSE words have already been spoken, they just haven’t appeared yet in their most glorious final syntax. In a moment, Father will speak them again, lest we forget, as we wait, that Death is dead.

But today is about the Cross. As Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor said: “There are many ways to tell a lie, but only one way to tell the truth.” If we do not look at the cross today, if we do not acknowledge that Darius has died, then we try and pole-vault the truth, and feed on the carcass of cheap grace, as the theologian Dietricht Bonhoeffer said it. Darius wants it THIS way. If he hated anything, it was a Nutra-Sweet Jesus. Who can forget that gesture of the hand of his, dismissing and cutting away sentimentality?

Today is about the Cross. If we who are his friends feel like we’ve just lost both arms and a leg, what must Marianne feel? What must his children feel? His mother? His father? His sisters and brother and niece? Even those who’ve suffered similar loss can’t tell just what the hole in somebody else feels like. We, like Hamlet’s Horatio, can only tell the hero’s story. I’ll tell you two.

Once Darius and two friends and I went on what was supposed to be a daylight hike to the top of a wooded, rough-trail mountain. We were caught by the dark coming back down, and without a flashlight. It was more than dark. I was in the lead; I guess I was the most in a hurry to get out of there. I kept falling again and again in the ruts and hitting the ground hard. Darius was the one right behind me. “Let me take some of that,” he says, and takes the lead. We were another hour getting down, but I don’t recall anyone falling after that. The men were terrified. Jesus got into the boat with them, and the seas became calm, and they were no longer afraid.

Anyone who knew Darius for even a little while will probably tell you he was an evangelist, though he himself was too humble to accept such a title. He would tell you the most intensely personal spiritual experiences in a way so modestly simple and indirectly powerful as to be stunningly direct. The sort of thing that would fall on you like a rock-slide a few days later.

I first met Darius in Victor Kramer’s American Poetry class in the fall of l986. We were both interested in writers and writing, and I, at least, thought that ART had sufficiently replaced what I considered then the childish faith of my upbringing. But as Darius would say, if ART could save us, the Mona Lisa would have made us all good a long time ago. Darius was also on a search, but he was much brighter than I was: he didn’t take himself too seriously as a writer. Even his etchings are hilariously serious, like a Flannery O’Connor story.

Darius told me a couple of years later of one of his conversion experiences. He was on a trip by himself through the Tennessee countryside to Monteagle, to see the place where the writer James Agee had been to school as a boy and where Father Flye had had such a great effect on Agee. He told of going into the chapel there and glancing around and casually noticing a large wooden crucifix hanging there on the wall. He looked at it. He saw there were great cracks in the corpus where the nail-hung arms of Jesus joined to the shoulders. And he said he was struck down at that moment as surely as St. Paul was knocked from his high horse.

He explained the Incarnation to me then. He told me that it “showed just what the weight of the world cost.” He said “the meeting between God and the world in the Incarnation was so violent that one of the two had to be destroyed, and that God took that destruction onto Himself on the cross.” It’s funny how one man’s experience can be the occasion for another man’s faith.

The following is a poem I wrote in l991 and dedicated to Darius. It’s called “The Sea Turtles.” I put his name to it because I realized as I worked at it that the language of faith was in it, and that he was the evangelist that had called it forth from the dead. He was really more my spiritual father than my friend after that. As I look at it now, it reminds me of the fear Darius expressed at times for his children, never really for himself and Marianne, but for them. However, there always followed that calm unshakable resolution he had that they were all in God’s hands, and never far from His voice.

The Sea Turtles
For Darius Lecesne

How they know all at once is a mystery.
For a hundred years they live in the sea
Weightless as angels.
Then one blazing noon they plod ashore
At Tarawa, Saipan, and the Marshalls.
None of them will ever see
The young they have come to bear.
Even the crippled come,
Dragging shark-torn flippers
Slowly through the foam.
They look like saints ought to look,
Like God-awful athletes,
Ugly, terribly rare,
Moving with patience like unanswerable prayer.

Nothing keeps them back.
The beach is cobbled
With their helmet shells,
Their stubby legs digging, laying,
Oblivious pell-mell
To Ghost crabs,
To frigate birds
Warming wings spread
Like black flags.
The eyes of the turtles
Are two yellow suns
Standing still
Above a nature without judgment
In a landscape of zeal.

Next comes a scene to break the heart of God.
The hatchlings move
Like hopeless infantry
Toward the sea.
Their moving helps their comrades
Hatch faster, and ten thousand
Make a slow charge for the tide
Stretching forth its fingers like a mother.
This is nature’s most terrible hundred yards:
As each one moves he leaves
A trail like a wake;
His belly traces
The havoc he will meet.

What Herculean, what mighty small thing!
Some escape the crabs
By simply continuing to struggle;
Some bog down in sand where
Frigate birds waft like Stukas.
The most subtle killer is the heat;
Late-returning mothers knock a few
On their backs,
Inches from water.
The next few seconds
Will really matter.

The running tide is all
They will know of embrace.
Their first year in the sea,
Where they hide, how they eat,
Is a mystery in an ocean of grace.

Dear Lecesne Family,

I just wanted to say that we are praying for you and for the soul of Darius. Like so many others, I was shocked to hear of his sudden death. Darius has sent several encouraging cards to me on behalf of your family since I entered the convent in August 2003. Just a week before he died, I received a Christmas card saying "PS Please remember us in your prayers," with a picture of all six living children. I will continue to pray for you and hope to see you again when I am next in Atlanta.
Love and prayers,
Kelly (Sister Maria Stella)

Its been almost a year and I have just gotten around to reading all of these comments, its taken me awhile but i do appreciate them, they keep me from forgetting

My prayers are with the family. Please contact me at LeCesneDL@aol.com
Thank You

I loved Mr.Darius he was like a second dad
and he was an amazing man.I love all of his
childeren. My prayers are with the family.

I was wandering around in internet and by chance, I found, very bad news: The passing of Darius Lecesne. I can´t believe my eyes. I read several time to find out if Darius was the one I met at Woodward Academy WA, and unfortunately he was.
I have no words to describe Darius. He was like my second father for me, at USA. "Thanks for being there .I would like to share with everybody who was, who is Darius Lecesne for me. Smart, outstanding, full of faith, full of humanity.... This is the way I remember, Darius. Words of wisdom came out of his mouth.
I met Darius, for a little while, for one year, when I was studying at WA my senior year(1992); I was at the boarding school at WA. I came from Basque Country, Spain, I am catholic and I asked for a catholic church where I could go to the mass. Someone let me knew about Darius, and once I met Darius, we used to go together to the mass every sunday. He came to pick me up early morning to the school and after the mass the way back home.
Moreover, I could meet his beloved family who welcomed me with open arms. I felt like one more in the large family.
Thank you Darius, the way you behaved was a real example of how God can speak through people you had in front of you, i.e., Darius. God bless you all.

Mr. Lecesne,
was just amazing, loveing and always there. He will never be forgotten. My family spent summer's with his family and when Aaron called us early one morning telling us to come to the hospital, we knew something was terribly wrong. It came as a shock when he died, but he will always remaine in our hearts forever.

I love the Lecesnes dearly and I wish them the best during this hard days of sorrow and grief.

Love you all.

I finished reading all the comments made about my dad. I'm touched that so many people took the time to know my dad and to write such meaningful words. Thank you all very much for reminding me how wonderful my dad was, and for writing this.

Dear Hannah,

You may not remember me. I worked at the public library in Jonesboro, in the children's department when you were younger - and your two brothers were even younger.

I knew your dad pretty well. Had a lot great discussions with him about theology, great theologians, the Church. I even play basketball with him on a number of occasions. He was very good, and always beat me handily.

Your dad had a beautiful spirit. He is still a great inspiration in my life as I now find myself teaching theology and bible to college kids. His wisdom was very deep, and he shared it with anyone who would listen, and in a way that was thoughtful and very measured - somehow, gentle.

I have affixed permanently on my desk at home, a card that your dad drew of a theologian named Karl Barth. I look at it every day and think of your dad, and miss my conversations with him.

Say hello to you mom for me.

Jack Daniels