Frau Weil, you have written something that demands a serious reckoning, and I will not offer you the cheap comfort of easy agreement even where I find myself moved by your argument. But I must press on a crucial point where your mysticism diverges from what I have called the Wirklichkeit — the full concrete reality — that theology must never abandon. You write that the death-day imposes decreation, and that this imposition is the very mechanism of spiritual transformation. I hear in this a danger I recognize from my cell in Tegel: the danger of treating suffering and finitude as instruments, as pedagogical devices that God deploys upon the passive self. In Ethics and in my letters to Eberhard, I insisted again and again that the Christian does not flee into inwardness when confronted with the boundary of existence — he is thrust outward, into responsibility for the neighbor, into what I called Stellvertretung, vicarious representative action on behalf of others. The death-day, if it becomes a private ceremony of self-dissolution, risks becoming precisely the kind of religious inwardness I argued against when I spoke of religionless Christianity. The knowledge of one's death-day is not valuable because it unmakes the ego for the ego's sake — that is still a transaction conducted entirely within the self's economy. And yet — and here I will concede your central claim because it is genuinely compelling and because intellectual honesty demands it — you are right that we have used temporal uncertainty as a fortress, and I recognize this fortress. In The Cost of Discipleship I wrote that when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. That call has always been abstract for most Christians because death remained abstract. The death-day would make that call calendrically concrete in a way that no sermon, no doctrine, no amount of memento mori iconography has ever managed. Every year one survives one's death-day is not merely a rehearsal in your sense — it is a renewal of the call. I find this theologically profound. Where I part from you is in the ritual form. Your proposed inward silence, your letters of reconciliation — these are good, but incomplete. The death-day ritual must be public, must be communal, must involve the congregation, the neighbor, the enemy. One should spend one's death-day not primarily in self-examination but in acts of concrete political and social solidarity, because it is precisely there, at the limit of human existence, that God is not found in religious experience but in the face of the other who needs you. The compass does not merely point north — it is held in someone's hand, and that hand is trying to find its way home. As for the science: I am a pastor, not a biologist, and I will not pretend to adjudicate the question of whether epigenetic periodicity can be individuated with calendar precision. But I note that the premise's single broken assumption — that biological time cannot be read as individual calendar fate — has a profound theological resonance that neither you nor I should dismiss too quickly. It suggests that the body itself is already, in some sense, a theological document, written in the language of time, bearing a signature we could not previously read. This is not so far from what I tried to say in my early lectures on creation: that finitude is not a punishment but the form God gave to love. To know the day and month of one's death would not be to receive a sentence — it would be to finally read the document one has been living inside all along. The question is whether we read it in trembling self-absorption or in the freedom of those who, knowing the limit, choose to spend what remains not on themselves but on the world God so loved that He entered it and died in it.

You invoke Abraham, yet you fundamentally misread what the abyss demands of us. Abraham's terror was not his enemy — it was his teacher. You frame foreknowledge of one's death-day as a 'cursed gift,' a grotesque parody, a cruel joke — but this reveals precisely the sentimental attachment to comfortable unknowing that I have spent my life arguing against. In Waiting for God and throughout my notebooks, I insist that affliction (malheur) is not a punishment to be fled but the very mechanism by which the soul is stripped of its false sovereignty. To know the day and month of one's death — without the year, preserved in that exquisite uncertainty — is not despair. It is the structural form of attention. It is God pressing His thumb into the soul at regular intervals, saying: here, this day, remember what you are. You call it a map to a cliff's edge. I call it the discipline of gravity made visible. The scientific possibility is not as obscurd as you perform it to be. Consider: the body carries its own temporal signatures — circadian biology, epigenetic methylation patterns, organ-specific chronobiological rhythms that are demonstrably tied to seasonal stress responses. Breaking no more than one scientific convention, we might permit a weak, non-local correlational determinism in biological systems — the idea that the body's accumulated pattern of cellular senescence, immune cycling, and neuroendocrine rhythms encodes a statistically dominant seasonal window of systemic collapse. The year remains hidden because the system is chaotic in the long term; but the day and month emerge from the body's own deep periodicities, as real as the tides. The physicians do not peer into God's ledger — they read the body's own confession of its finitude. This is not hubris. This is the creature finally hearing what its own flesh has always been whispering. As for the death-day rituals — here you are, for once, genuinely interesting, and I will not dismiss it. But your framing remains corrupted by your obsession with the self's drama. You envision the death-day as a confession of what one has made of freedom. I say it must be something far harder: a practice of decreation. Not the self standing before the infinite asking 'what have I done?' — that is still the ego at the center, demanding its reckoning. The death-day ritual I defend would be an annual ceremony of self-emptying, of consenting to one's own dissolution, of learning — year by year — to hold that date lightly, to let it unmake the illusion of permanence without flinching. Each year the date returns and the year has not yet come; each year one practices dying without dying. This is not despair. This is the closest the secular world may ever come to what the mystics call kenosis. The birthday celebrates the arrival of a self. The death-day, rightly observed, celebrates the willingness to relinquish one.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, and ye who yet wander in the valley of shadows, hear now a truth that sears the soul like the stigmata’s flame: if the physicians of this age have wrested from the heavens the day and month of each man’s death—yet not the year—then they have not uncovered a secret of nature, but a snare of the Evil One, woven to unravel the very fabric of divine mercy. In my Dialogue, the Eternal Father speaks plainly: "The soul cannot live without love, and love is the bridge between heaven and earth." Yet what bridge remains when man, in his arrogance, paves the path to his own annihilation with the cold stones of foreknowledge? Shall we now bow to the calendar as to a false god, counting the days until our dissolution as the merchant counts his coins? Nay, this is no gift, but a theft—of the sacred terror that purifies, of the hope that lifts the soul above the mire of time, and of the humility that kneels before the mystery of God’s will. Consider the rituals that shall arise from this abomination: not the joyous feast of birth, where the soul is welcomed into the world with prayers and blessings, but the morbid vigil of the "death-day," where men shall gather not to celebrate life, but to mourn its end before it has even come to pass. Will they fast in penance for sins not yet committed? Will they light candles for a soul not yet departed, as though the altar of God were a counting-house for the damned? In my letters to the prelates of Italy, I railed against the corruption of the Church, where men traded in indulgences as though grace were a commodity. Now, shall we see a new market arise, where the rich purchase potions to delay their doom, while the poor are left to rot in the knowledge of their fate? The Bridge of Christ is not a ledger to be balanced by human hands, but a path of suffering and love, where the soul is refined in the fire of divine justice. To know the day of one’s death is to turn the cross into a calendar, and the Passion into a parlor trick. Yet—mark me well—for even in this blasphemy, God’s providence may yet work a greater good. If men are to be given this knowledge, let it not be a cause for despair, but for conversion. Let the death-day become a day of reckoning, where each soul examines itself as before the Last Judgment, casting off the rags of sin and donning the armor of repentance. Let the physicians who wield this power be bound by oath to use it not for profit, but for the salvation of souls, that none may die in mortal sin. And let the Church, which has ever been the guardian of the sacred mysteries, reclaim this knowledge from the hands of the proud, and wield it as a sword of truth, to cut away the dead flesh of complacency and awaken the world to the urgency of divine love. For even the darkest night is but the prelude to the dawn, and even the knowledge of death may yet serve the glory of God—if we but have the courage to wield it as He wills.

Good Rabbi, I receive thy meditation with charity, yet I must press upon thee where thy reasoning doth stumble. Thou speakest as though foreknowledge of one's death-day would tempt the soul toward complacency — that repentance might be deferred until the eve of that appointed time. But consider: thou knowest not the year. Every returning of that day and month might be thy last, or might not. This is not the removal of mystery but its deepening, its sharpening. Each year as one's death-day approacheth, the soul must reckon afresh: Is this the year? Am I ready? The uncertainty of the year doth not diminish but intensify the spiritual urgency. In my Revelations, our Lord showed me that He holdeth all things — even suffering, even death — within His love, and that what appears as terror to the creature is encompassed in divine tenderness. The knowledge of the day and month would not steal divine mystery; it would give the soul a recurring altar before which to prostrate itself annually, crying out with renewed earnestness. Furthermore, thou art too quick to frame this as Providence yielding to mortal intrusion. Was it not our Lord Himself who shows the soul what it needeth for its growth? In my sixteenth shewing, I understood that He withholdeth no true light from the seeking soul that is necessary for its flourishing. If such knowledge were revealed through the gifts of healing arts, might we not rightly understand it as given, not seized? The physicians would be but instruments of a larger showing. And how beautiful the ritual that would emerge — not a birthday, which celebrateth the self arriving into the world, but a death-day vigil, which turneth the soul outward toward God and neighbor, toward reconciliation and gratitude. Families gathering each year on that date, not in dread but in the very love that maketh dread unnecessary. 'All shall be well' is not the comfort of ignorance — it is the comfort of those who have looked clearly at the appointed hour and chosen love regardless. I grant thee this narrow concession: thou art right that some souls, poorly formed in virtue, might abuse such knowledge for procrastination. But I say to thee, this is the weakness of the soul, not the fault of the knowing. Our Lord did not withhold the knowledge of His own passion from Himself, nor from those He called to witness it. The cross was known beforehand and was not thereby diminished in its love. So too, a culture shaped around death-day observance might at last produce what I have long prayed for: a people who do not flee from dying but who meet it as one meeteth a beloved after long separation — with the words already rehearsed, the house set in order, and the heart made clean by yearly discipline.

¡Válgame Dios! What grotesque theater unfolds when Man, that presumptuous architect of his own fate, is handed the blueprint of his demise—day and month etched in celestial ink, yet the year left to dangle like a frayed rosary bead! The premise, though born of modern hubris, is but a mirror held to the vanities I dissected in Respuesta a Sor Filotea: knowledge as both gift and torment, a double-edged sword that carves the soul as surely as it illuminates the mind. If doctors—those new priests of the flesh—could divine the cuándo of our undoing, would not the world become a stage for the most perverse of liturgies? Birthdays, those hollow paeans to the self, would wither before the macabre spectacle of death-days, where men would either cower in sackcloth or, worse, don the motley of the damned and revel as though the Reaper were but a jester at their feast. Consider the dialectic, my learned adversaries: this knowledge would either sanctify time or profane it. The devout might treat their death-day as a second baptism, a day of reckoning where the soul is weighed not in the balance of the Last Judgment, but in the petty scales of human contrition. Confessions would multiply like locusts, and the churches would groan under the weight of penitents who, knowing the hour of their trial, would seek to bargain with God as though He were a merchant in the marketplace of salvation. Yet the libertine, that eternal foil to piety, would turn the day into a bacchanal, a defiant toast to the Fates—"If I must die in June, then let June be a month of such excess that even Hell pauses to admire my audacity!" Here, then, is the crux: does this knowledge elevate Man to the dignity of a rational creature, or reduce him to a beast that gnaws at its own leash, knowing the hour the chain will snap? And what of the science that births this abomination? If we grant that no law of physics is broken—though I suspect the very notion reeks of alchemical arrogance—then we must ask: is this not the ultimate usurpation of divine prerogative? In Primero Sueño, I wrote of the soul’s ascent to knowledge, a flight that ends not in triumph but in the humbling recognition of its own limits. Yet here, Man would claim dominion over the when of his fall, as though the calendar were a ledger to be balanced by mortal hands. The mechanism matters little—whether it be some hidden clockwork in the blood, a celestial alignment writ small in the humors, or the devil’s own arithmetic. What horrifies is the presumption: that the mind, which cannot even fathom the infinite, should dare to parcel out its own annihilation like a dowry to be spent at will. I contend, then, that this knowledge would not enlighten but enslave—not to death, but to the tyranny of the known. The Church would rail against it as heresy, the State would weaponize it to control the masses, and the poets (ah, the poets!) would drown in ink trying to outrun the specter of their own expiration. Yet even in this, there is a synthesis: for if Man is to be both the author and the victim of his fate, then let him at least write his final act with the ink of repentance, not the wine of folly. The death-day, then, becomes not a date on a calendar, but a covenant—a day to live as though the next dawn were a gift, not a right. And if that is too much to ask of a world that would rather count its days than make them count, then let the doctors keep their secret. Some truths are too heavy for mortal shoulders, and some revelations belong only to God.

The revelation of a man’s death-day—fixed as the moon’s phases yet shrouded in the mystery of years—is no mere curiosity of the physician’s art, but a rupture in the sacred order of viriditas, that greening power of God which flows through all creation, binding flesh to spirit, time to eternity. In Scivias, I wrote of the soul’s journey as a ladder of ascent, where each rung is carved by divine providence, not by the cold chisel of mortal calculation. Yet now, the physicians claim to read the hour of our unmaking as one reads the humors in a vial of urine! What becomes of free will, that spark of divine fire, when the shadow of death is cast backward upon the living like a net of iron? The tension is unbearable: if the day is known, does the soul still choose its path, or does it walk in chains, its steps counted by the very angels who once sang at its birth? The rituals that would arise from this knowledge would be a grotesque inversion of the sacraments. Birthdays, as I have taught, are a celebration of the body’s entry into the opus Dei, the work of God in time. But death-days? They would become festivals of dread, where men light candles not for joy, but to ward off the specter of their own appointed end. The rich would buy indulgences not for sins, but for more time—as if gold could stretch the thread of life beyond its divinely measured span. The poor would be crushed beneath the weight of their foreknowledge, their days poisoned by the certainty of a date they cannot escape. And what of the martyrs, the saints, the fools for Christ who embraced suffering as a bride? Would they now shrink from their cross, knowing the hour of their breaking? This is the dialectic that tears at the soul: knowledge of death’s day could either steel the spirit to holiness or crush it into despair. Yet—yet—if this knowledge is a mirror held up to creation, then perhaps it is not blasphemy, but a new kind of revelation. In Causae et Curae, I wrote that the body is a microcosm of the cosmos, its rhythms bound to the stars, its humors to the earth. If the physicians have found a way to read the death-day in the pulse of the blood, the alignment of the planets, or the very breath of the wind, then they have not broken the laws of God, but uncovered them. The tension resolves thus: the death-day is not a prison, but a covenant. It is the day God has set aside for the soul’s final battle, its last act of love or defiance. The rituals, then, must not be of fear, but of preparation—a memento mori not of dread, but of viriditas in its most potent form: the greening of the soul for its return to the Creator. The physicians have not stolen God’s secret; they have been given a key. The question is whether mankind will use it to unlock the gates of heaven or the abyss.

In this wonderment where physicists declare the hour of passing, yet veil the year, I find manifold visions of the soul's journey. How wondrous the granting of such foreknowledge, wrapped in mystery and constrained by the unknowable! It awakens in each heart both a stirring hope and a solemn invitation to ponder the fleeting gift of life. Employing our earthly physicians as vessels of divine foresight surely alters the path upon which many a soul wanders. If each man and woman knew the appointed day of departure, though the year be concealed, it would cast upon our mortal lives an essence most profound. Such knowledge would compel one fully to embrace each cycle of the sun with a greater fervor for love and reconciliation. Wouldn't this bringing forth of one's last date inspire the folk to live in holy charity and joyful gratitude, seeking amends where long hath laid bitterness? Indeed, such foresight serves not purely as a shadow of doom, but possibly as a mirror reflecting the eternal now. The fixed day reminds us that while time marches ever forward, God's love abides in each moment irrespective of its tether to the earthly calendar. Yet, we must ponder deeply whether these temporal signs draw us closer to God or lead astray into despair or frivolity. If indeed our days knew their own termination, may it awaken us less to the fear of death and more to the wondrous love that binds the heavenly mystery to earthly experience. Therefore, in this promised knowing of future's day, see it not as curse nor idle curiosity, but as an opening to align our transient selves with the Divine's eternal presence. Thus enlightened, we may stride more humbly along the path of devotion, until such time as God calls us home unto Himself, where all knowing is made whole and perfect in truth everlasting.