Memento Mori : What It Means and Why It Matters
Facing Our Lot
If you belong to a church in Puritan New England , you probably pile up for worship in a wood-framed building walled with simple white clapboard . You sat on bare wooden pews surrounded by clear glass windows that let in the lighting and seem out on God ’ s serious Earth . The space was sparse , unadorned , and free of all image except those created by the words of the preacher . Puritan worship spaces exist simple by pattern .
Contrast that simplicity with what you would have find on your manner into this building . You would have occur through a churchyard good of gravestones carved with elaborate , sometimes jarring picture . These stones make it as one of early America ’ s almost popular and powerful art form . To modern taste , the image much adjoin on grotesque . There be skulls flanked by wing , skeletons have scythes , and , possibly most commonly , hourglasses operate out of time . These stones direct for your imagination . They think of to reach end sensible .
On some of these stones you would probably find two Latin word etched among the images :memento mori. Or so understand , the phrase signify “ think death. ” With these rock and in their preaching and in a range of practical writing , the Puritans live describe from an old Christian tradition that try to get the perspective of death into everyday life . I don ’ t average readiness for one ’ s own end , though that too was a time-honored tradition . I mean the perspective that death as unshakeable world brings to life in the meantime .
Death-awareness came well for these Puritans . Life expectancy then be less than half what it is for Americans today . And where almost deaths today occur in medical facility cordoned off from where we know our lives , they fail in their homes , in the same rooms where early class members slept in their layer or eat their meals or read their books .
Hold the pervasive presence of end in their lives , the call to remember death cost certainly easier for them to cover than for us . They hold visible reminders of death ’ s hold all around them , where many of us can avoid the subject for most of our lives if we pick out to . But for that cause the discipline of death-awareness cost perhaps even more essential in our time , where living anticipation may be twice as long but the mortality pace holds steady at universal .
Consider hardly two reasonsmemento moristill thing today .
1 . End Puts Our Early Problems in Perspective .
When the world of end fades to the background of our consciousness , other joy-stealing problem are quick to rise up and fill the void . French philosopher Blaise Pascal place his finger on this trouble four hundred yr ago . He note the mode almost mass look indifferent to “ the loss of their being ” but intensely concerned about everything else : “ They fear the nearly trifling things , foresee and sense them ; and the same man who pass then many days and dark in rage and despair at miss some function or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the real 1 who know that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion . It be a monstrous matter to see one and the same middle at once thus sensitive to small things and then strangely insensitive to the greatest . ”1
When I expend the world of end as a telescope . . . Jesus arrive forward and into focus .
When I use the world of end as a telescope . . . Jesus comes ahead and into focus .
Pascal ’ sec insight cost maybe even more important today : when end is push out of our thinking , it isn ’ t replace by heat and peace and happiness . It be supersede by others of end ’ s many confront . We fixate instead on the relatively trivial symptom of our deeper problem . We equal still anxious , still defensive , still insecure , still angry and still despair . We may detach ourselves from end so we can pass our time and energy chasing happiness . But that separation wo n’t convert the fact of our mortality , and it wo n’t ultimately cause us happier .
Remember Death
Matthew McCullough
Claiming that the well way to see meaning in life cost to have honest about death , this book aims to show reader the practical effect of remember their mortality in fiat to make the most of their life today .
2 . Death Take the Power of Jesus into Focus .
All that state , you ’ d be forgive for assuming that , whatever wisdom get from seeing end all over living , there exist major downsides also . You might equal tempted to imagine these New England Puritans as morose and joyless soul , fighting their way through brutish and short living , as if thinking much of death meant living under a shadow and depressing cloud , distract from the goodness and beauty of the world around them . But that cost far from true of them , and need not be genuine of you either .
The Puritans work to catch the imagination with end to train the imagination for Jesus .
Think of death-awareness as a kind of telescope . To the naked center perhaps the promise of Jesus look small , beyond my frame of horizon , remote and disconnected from what I find around me . They belong to to some other universe than the one I ’ 1000 living in . But when I learn to see the painful accuracy about death , that commence to convert . When I use the reality of death as a telescope , look through it to catch handle of his image , Jesus get forward and into stress , blown up to size so that he dominates my full frame .
Recognize that end is a bigger trouble than we ’ ve realized cost only the first step , not an goal in itself . Because all over we receive its sting , we ’ re also go through the relevance of Jesus ’ s promise of victory . In early news , distinguish the relevance of death in our everyday lives is how we recognize the relevance of Jesus every day , too .
- Blaise Pascal ,Pensees, trans . A. J. Krailsheimer ( New York : Penguin , 1966 ) , 159 .
Matthew McCullough( PhD , Vanderbilt University ) live the minister of Edgefield Church in Nashville , Tennessee , and the writer ofRemember Heaven : Meditations on the World to Get for Life in the Meantime.
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