“Memento mori is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. “ (Wikipedia)
At various times of my life, I have wanted to acquire a “memento mori” – a visible reminder that this life is short. You may have seen these in medieval paintings, all sorts of folks dressed up for portraits and holding a skull. Some folks went so far as to have a sculpture done with half their head lifelike and the other half a skull.

As an adult with ADD (attention deficit disorder), this was another attempt to get myself to focus. I have always had a tendency to lose myself in all kinds of things, mostly things other than the things I needed to be doing. As a child, I could dutifully walk miles to the library, come home with a stack of books half my height and delightfully spend uninterrupted hours reading them straight through sitting in a corner of the living room but I couldn’t spend more than five minutes on homework due a week earlier. I’ve always had an uncanny ability to distract myself as a way of dealing with anxiety. Unfortunately, this always just produced even more anxiety in the long run. Somehow, I thought, being focused on the ultimate end, my death, might just shake me out of my distractions and get me serious enough to “buckle down.”

I don’t know if it would have worked back then because I never got around to getting a memento mori, I just thought about it – something I’ve been good at for many years.

Now I have an opportunity to find out. Caroline gave me a memento mori she drew as part of an art class reinterpreting Dali’s work (see picture below).

The tradition of memento mori – understanding “the vanity and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits” certainly has a basis in scripture and in Christian tradition. Remember the parable of the Rich Fool (as my NRSV Bible calls it) in Luke 12? This is a clear attempt to put the value of earthly goods into the context of our earthly lives. The person who stores up material possessions to keep worry from their door, may become, in the text of this story, both “rich” (in earthly terms) and “foolish” when seen from a kingdom view.

Now, if I was really paying attention, I would have noticed another recent memento mori which underscores the theme of this reading from Luke. On Ash Wednesday, Pastor Art drew a cross of ashes on my forehead and reminded me that my body was created from dust and will soon return again to dust. This is a clear reminder of death. It’s important to pay attention to death because death has many lessons to share with us. Let us pray that we do not wait until the day before our death, like the man in today’s text, to start to learn them.

I’ll talk more about death’s lessons in Part 2 of this blog series. Until then, read the truth about worry in the Kingdom of God in the second part of today’s lesson and think about how we can live to bring this Kingdom about. Remember always that God loves you unconditionally!

Mike

Today’s Reading: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12%3A13-34&version=NRSV