Skip to main content

Momento Mori

Try this exercise. Get a piece of paper and draw a timeline, using either one-year or five-year intervals. Now, think of your family and closer friends and plot, generally, their life expectancies. You will find that you are older than you think and your family members and older friends are closer to their own deaths than you might like. You might become a little uncomfortable. You and I don’t have many years left, in the great scheme of things, even if we live out our life expectancies; how are we going to use them?  

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
With this latest panic, I have been reminded of the momento mori, or the habit of remembering your mortality. This idea has had a rather extensive history and depending on what culture we might be talking about or author we might read, it has a slightly different focus. In many cases, it is intended to prompt a more virtuous life – because you never know. In others, the idea shifts to remembering that we are “but dust.” With that, it takes on an added dimension of remembering that we are children of God and we should examine ourselves in that light. Both ideas are parallel, but the latter speaks also to managing one’s ego and interactions with other people. We are not simply cultivating virtues for virtue’s sake, but we are submitting ourselves to the will of God for others, actively in our lives.  

This idea then is not synonymous with “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die,” but more of a self-awareness of who we are and who we are called to be. Do I take offense at this or that slight, or do I let them go? Do I assert my interests or yield to the interests of others? The Christian call is to consistently put the interests of others ahead of their own because we are disciples of The One who “while we were yet sinner, Christ died for us.” In becoming like Jesus we too give ourselves for others. This is important, that we understand that we are in fact mortal and that we will physically die eventually. For us, that reality isn’t an excuse to seize the day but an impetus to die to ourselves and be ready to be poured out for others. 

There is another aspect to this and that is that we are ready to die physically at any moment. That death isn’t eagerly anticipated most of the time, but it is a sober acceptance of reality. Keeping this reality in mind, we realize that our time to bless others is short and while that is true, we are prepared to leave this world now.  

When we are prepared to die, times like these don’t disturb us as much, at least for ourselves and our lives are calmer. As we keep in mind momento mori, our lives have greater purpose and yet less anxiety. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...
4 comments
Read more

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Where’s the Church Building?

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...
1 comment
Read more