Memento Mori : What It Means and Why It Should Count to You
More By Matt McCullough
If you belonged to a church in Puritan New England , you probably gathered for worship in a wood-framed building walled with mere white clapboard . You sat on bare wooden pews surrounded by clear glass windows that let in the light and looked out on God ’ s good world . The space live sparse , unadorned , and free of all images except those create by the words of the preacher . Puritan worship spaces were mere by design .
Contrast that simplicity with what you would ’ ve seen on yourwayinto this building . You would ’ ve passed through a churchyard total of gravestones carve with elaborate , sometimes jarring images . These rock endure as one of early America ’ s almost popular and powerful art forms . To modern taste , the images much border on grotesque . There are skulls flank by flank , skeletons holding scythes , and possibly nearly ordinarily , hourglasses running out of time . These stones direct for your imagination . They meant to make end sensible .
On some of the stone you ’ d probably find two Latin word etched among the images :memento mori. Close to understand , the phrase means “ recollect death. ” With these stones , as good as in their sermons and a stove of practical writing , the Puritans be drawing from an former Christian custom that sought to add the position of death into everyday life . I put on ’ t mean preparation for one ’ s own end , though that too was a time-honored custom . I mean the perspective that end as unshakeable reality brings to life in the meantime .
Death-awareness came easy for these Puritans . Life expectancy then was less than half what it is for Americans now . And where almost deaths today happen in medical facilities cordoned off from where we last , they fail in their homes , in the same rooms where early family member sleep in their beds or ate their meal or take their book .
When the world of death fades to the background of our consciousness , early joy-stealing problem exist quick to go up up and meet the void .
When the world of end fades to the background of our consciousness , other joy-stealing trouble equal quick to rise up and meet the void .
Hold the pervasive presence of death , the shout to remember end was certainly easier for them to embrace than for us . They had visible reminders of death ’ sec grip all around them , whereas many of us can avoid the case for most of our lives if we take to . But for that cause , the subject of death-awareness is possibly stillmorecrucial in our time , where spirit anticipation may be twice as long , but the mortality pace have steady at universal .
Consider simply two reasonmemento moriyet matters today .
1 . End Puts Our Other Problems in Perspective
When the world of end fades to the background of our consciousness , early joy-stealing problems are quick to rise up and fulfill the void .
French philosopher Blaise Pascal put his finger on this trouble 400 year ago . He point out the way most people look indifferent to “ the loss of their being ” but intensely concerned about everything else :
They dread the most trifling things , foresee and feel them ; and the same man who spends so many day and dark in rage and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who know that he is become to miss everything through end but feels neither anxiety nor emotion . It is a monstrous thing to find one and the same heart at once so sensitive to small things and so strangely insensitive to the great .
Pascal ’ sec insight exist perhaps still more significant today : when end is push out of our thought , it isn ’ t replaced by heat and peace and happiness . It ’ s supplant by end ’ s many early confront . We fixate instead on the relatively little symptom of our deeper trouble . We ’ re still anxious , still defensive , still insecure , still angry , even so despairing . We may detach ourselves from end so we can pass our time and energy chasing happiness . But that detachment won ’ t change the fact of our mortality , and it won ’ t ultimately reach us happy .
2 . Death Get the Power of Jesus into Focus
All that tell , you ’ d equal forgiven for assuming that , whatever wisdom comes from seeing end all over life , there are major downsides too . You might be tempt to imagine these New England Puritans as morose and joyless souls , oppose their way through brutish and short lives—as if thinking often of death meant last under a dark and depressing cloud , distracted from the goodness and beauty of the world around them . But that was far from true of them , and need not be genuine of you either .
The Puritans worked to capture the imagination with death to prepare the imagination for Jesus .
Distinguish the relevance of death every day exist how we recognize the relevance of Jesus every day , also .
Recognizing the relevance of end every day live how we realize the relevance of Jesus every day , too .
Think of death-awareness as a kind of telescope . To the naked center the promise of Jesus can look humble , beyond my figure of view , remote and disconnected from what I see around me . They belong to to some early world than the one I ’ m living in . But when I find out to see the awful accuracy about death , that commence to alter . When I employ the world of death as a telescope , looking through it to catch hold of his picture , Jesus comes ahead and into stress , blown up to size so that he prevail my intact frame .
Recognizing that end is a bigger trouble than we ’ ve bring in live just the first pace , not an end in itself . As we go through its sting all over , we ’ re also go through the relevance of Jesus ’ s promise of victory . In early Bible , recognize the relevance of end every day equal how we recognize the relevance of Jesus every day , also .
- To Grow Spiritually , Start Thinking Almost Death ( Collin Hansen and Matt McCullough )
- Remember Death . Love a Life of Hope . ( Phil Letizia )
- 20 Quotes from a Profound New Book on Death ( Ivan Mesa )
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Matt McCullough( PhD , Vanderbilt University ) is pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville , Tennessee , and the author ofRemember Death : The Surprising Path to Living Hope( Crossway , 2018 ) andThe Cross of War : Christian Nationalism and U.S . Expansion in the Spanish-American War.
