Memento Mori | Remember Your Death

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Yesterday’s meditation reminded us “the goal of Advent is to be prepared to welcome our Savior, Jesus.” We reflected that we do this by living the Beatitudes. One thing that has helped Christians to live the Beatitudes throughout the centuries has been the two-word phrase – memento mori.  It is usually translated into English as, “Remember your Death”.  This is fitting in the first two weeks of Advent as we look to the Eschaton, the Second Advent of Christ.

This might seem unnerving or morbid, but I assure you it was at the center of the lives so many of the saints who have gone before us. St Jerome, the famous translator of the scriptures and doctor of the Church, always worked with a skull on his desk. St Francis of Assisi, the joyful beggar himself, would frequently carry a skull with him. So, this wasn’t only reminding them about death, but a steadfast reminder of how it is these saints wanted to live.

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You see, you and I can go through life always assuming, taking for granted, there will be another day, another chance, in short with the attitude that “it” can be done later. The “its” are so many things in our lives, but the “its” are so often time with people, sincere apologies and reconciliations which should be made, or even more those we need to forgive “as we have been forgiven”. It is not that we should think about our judgment, and then somehow be scared into right action and behavior, though that may well be a positive side-effect. No, more we should remember that one day we shall run out of time. An atheist friend once chided that I was only doing a certain thing because I was afraid I’d be judged at the end of my life. I assured her that what I was doing had everything to do with the end of my life, but not in the courtroom setting she had envisioned. God will not prosecute me, in fact it is the Devil who is called “the accuser of the brethren”. No, I shared with her, that one day I would die and be in the presence of Love Himself and I didn’t want to imagine the pain I would feel being different than that Love when He had given me so many opportunities to become like Him. What opportunities are you missing because you lack urgency?

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CCC #2559 states that humility is the foundation of prayer. Death can teach us about this. Listen to this story from the Desert Fathers:

A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I might be saved.’ So the old man said to him, Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.’

The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’

He replied, ‘No.’

The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them apostles, saints, and righteous men. He returned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’

And the old man said to him, ‘Did they not answer you.’ The brother shook his head no. Then Abba Macarius said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too, if you wish to be saved, must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’

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One of the times I’ve been most struck by the remembrance of death as a meditation was upon entering the church of Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins in Rome. You can look at pictures online yourself, but it is a church composed of a number of chapels. Yet what is unique is that the artwork is almost entirely comprised of the bones of deceased Capuchin Franciscan Friars, the bones of over 4000 friars to be exact. Many are whole skeletons in Franciscan Habit holding crosses, or patterns intricately laid out with different parts of the skeletons. Though this was very striking in and of itself, what most struck me was the plaque upon entering, in 3 different languages, as if the Friars were speaking, states, “What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you soon will be.” I remember I was 19 years old, a time when most, if not believing it, surely live as though death will not come. Yet, in that moment reading the plaque, I knew it would come and I wanted to, as St Robert Bellarmine wrote, “die well”. (The Art of Dying Well)  Dying to ourselves, the World, the Flesh, and the temptations of the Devil, the whole Christian life is learning this ‘art of dying well’.

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This remembrance of death serves us not only in helping us along in our repentance and conforming to the Gospel, but also in our sharing of the Gospel. This sentiment is what allowed the great Methodist missionary James Calvert to respond the way he did as he was going to share Christ on the Islands of Fiji with Cannibals.  It is related of him that as they arrived at the Islands, the ship’s captain tried to turn him back, saying, “You will lose your life and the life of those with you if you go among such savages.” To which Calvert replied ‘We died before we came here.”  I get afraid to share this rosary with friends, family, and strangers. We’d do well when it comes to evangelization to memento mori- remember our death.