Memento Mori

 

Detail of Danse Macabre fresco in the Holy Trinity Church, Hrastovlje, Slovenia

 During the Black Death in Europe, some people held lavish feasts, being certain that a horrible death was impending. Isn't that like life for many people, really? It's like life for all of us to some degree. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Indeed for many (with their bucket lists,) the knowledge of death seems to bring with it an imperative to experience more stuff and obtain more stuff and get more pleasures before Death calls up your number. But once it does, what then?

Something that was common in the Middle Ages that we really could use more of today was, they made use of frequent reminders that life was fleeting and the aims and ambitions of this world are abject folly. Are you going to have a feast in a charnel house? That's what the world is. Will you revel in a place of death? Should you even be capable of having the heart to do such a thing? Are you going to drink hearty as the Grim Reaper puts his hand on your shoulder? Or "slide into your grave with a margarita in hand saying 'what a ride!'" as that saying goes?

If after you died, you had to explain yourself after having lived a life seeking pleasure and "experiences," how would you even do that? I would say, you couldn't possibly do so. If you were to see someone laughing, drinking, and dancing naked in the immediate aftermath of a bloody battle with the cries of the wounded and disemboweled all around them, and the bullets still whizzing past their ears, you would say they were heartless and senseless at best and insane at worst. And yet, do we not all do that? That scene is this world.

Even our food, and I have a notable weakness for food - we eat corpses to live. Tasty corpses, but still corpses. Even vegans: vegans have a notable blind spot for the fact that innumerable invertebrates must be killed in order to grow their food, and the process of growing it destroys habitat for wild plants and animals who won't even have the opportunity to live. We eat death, we live in death, we make babies in death. To revel in pleasure and experiences in the house of death is also death: in that case potentially our spiritual death.

Memento Mori: "Remember that you have to die." And after death, the Judgment.

The philosophy of this current culture is the philosophy of the bucket list. Yes it dreams of forestalling death by the magic of medicine, some even hope that humans might one day be digitized (what a nightmare,) but otherwise in the face of their certain death the strategy is, "party down boys, it will be last call soon." What madness!

It seems like something from a strange alien planet now, but at one time, devout Christians wore cilices under their garments, or wore purposely rough garments, to chastise their flesh a little. They sought to chasten their bodies to expand their spirits. They sought the discipline of discomfort to remind themselves that meaning is not sought through pleasure and that comfort can be and often is the enemy of meaning and enlightenment. We are not talking about severe suffering, just persistent discomfort. Nothing demonstrates sincerity towards G-d like depriving your body for the sake of your soul. Jesus said, "he who would save his life will lose it." And it is life we seek, but not this life built on death and surrounded by death. A completely new life. One of Jesus' most frequent messages is that he had come to give eternal life to his sheep that were given to him by his Father.

"Jesus replied, “Are you not in error because you do not know the
Scriptures or the power of God?
When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor
be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."

~Mark 12:24-25

This transitory life must be lived in the light and knowledge of the infinity of the END. To party down in the charnel house is the definition of madness. Everyone knows they die: what they may not know is that they will have to justify the time and life they were given. What did you do with it? How can you justify the suffering of the mother that bore you and all the innocent creatures that met their graves in your gullet? Did you even TRY to rebel against the devil and eternal death?

Or did you dance the Devil's tune, gyrating to the Danse Macabre?