Memento Mori as Focus Medicine
Remembering that you're going to die as an antidote for distraction
A few months ago, a friend told me that anticipating his wife’s impending and serious surgery was having an interesting effect on him: it was helping him focus and be more productive than he had been for a long time. “It’s like knowing that I don’t have endless time, that my life could be cut short at any moment is giving me a clarity of focus,” he said.
I’ve written before about how our capacity to pay attention is closely linked with our capacity for prayer and faithful living as followers of Jesus, and my friend’s comments made me remember that memento mori1 is a quite ancient Christian practice commended to us especially by the desert fathers for the purpose of resisting the distractions that lead us away from the life God shares with us.
In The Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. John Climacus writes, “It is impossible… to spend the present day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our whole life.”
St. Antony is said to have engaged in some of his most intense spiritual battles while living in a tomb (a constant reminder of death).
Evagrius of Pontus counsels, “Remember the day of your death. See then what the death of your body will be; let your spirit be heavy, take pains, condemn the vanity of the world, so as to be able to live always in the peace you have in view without weakening.”
The refreshing good news of remembering death?
This all feels a bit weird and grotesque to our modern sensibilities. We are taught to envision our dreams coming true, living into our “best selves,” and imagining an upward trajectory to our lives. Thinking about death seems overly morbid and unhelpful to our imaginations, formed as they are by the fever dreams of techno-capitalists. We tend to reflexively associate memento mori with forms of mental illness rather than a practice of Christian wisdom. (Don’t hear what I’m not saying: not all thoughts of death are edifying. Some are signs of mental illness that need to be taken seriously.)
All this is why I appreciate the season of Lent each year, and especially Ash Wednesday, where we are marked with ashes and told “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In a world filled with entertainment options designed to distract us from reckoning with the contingency and frailty of our humanity, memento mori can be a bracing and, ironically perhaps, refreshing antidote to our relentless avoidance of contemplating death.
Thinking about this reminded me of the Ash Wednesday sermon I preached this year at my church, which I’ve adapted below. Even though it’s a sermon meant to launch us into Lent (and we are now more than halfway done with Lent), I hope that it can serve as an encouragement for you to keeping “leaning in” to Lent, all the way to Easter.
Do you guys ever think about dying?
In the Barbie movie that came out last year, right in the middle of an elaborate dance party for all her friends at the Barbie Dream House, Barbie blurts out, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”
The music grinds to a halt and everyone stares at her, horrified. Embarrassed by her party faux pax, Barbie brushes it off for the moment, and the dance party continues, but the next day we see that her comment has caused deeply disturbing changes in Barbieland: Barbie’s fake shower is freezing. The fake milk on her cereal has gone sour. Her perfect tippy-toe feet that fit right into high heels have gone flat. Most horrifying of all, her beautiful, unblemished skin is showing signs of… cellulite!
The rest of the movie details Barbie’s journey into the real world, where her idyllic existence is shattered as she realizes that life is hard, suffering is unavoidable, and death comes for us all. Much like it is in Barbieland, most of us don’t really like to think about dying. The basic message of Ash Wednesday is “You are going to die” and that doesn’t immediately feel like good news to us. We spend billions of dollars in this country trying to deny and delay and avoid death. We are severely allergic to any whiff of limitation, weakness, frailty, or mortality.
But the good news of Ash Wednesday is that the life that is truly life is ours in Jesus Christ, and this life is revealed to us and communicated to us through weakness, vulnerability, and mortality. The upside-down abundance of the kingdom is our inheritance. So, though prayer, and fasting, and giving, let us lay hold of salvation and receive the grace of Lent.
Misgivings about Lent
A lot of us have inherited ideas about Lent that are bent toward gloominess and melancholy, rooted in what my friend Krispin Mayfield calls a shame-filled spirituality that believes the best way to get close to God is to condemn ourselves for falling below the standard of perfection.
We think “perfection” is what God wants, and we know we can’t ever be good enough, but we think that we might be able to get close to God by punishing ourselves for not being good enough. We try to get close to God by proving that we know how bad and unlovable we are. So we often enter into Lent thinking that it’s about being harder on ourselves to prove to God that we know how worthless we are.
The weird upside-down abundance of God’s kingdom
But the passages we read on Ash Wednesday give us a different picture of the Lenten disciplines of repentance, one that is full of grace and good news. The call to repent is always given in the context of the good news that God’s life has drawn near, and so to repent is to respond to God’s goodness by turning away from that which brings destruction and toward that which contributes toward holistic flourishing for all.
So the message of Lent isn’t “fast and pray and repent so you remember what a worthless miserable pile of dung you are.” It’s
Fast and pray and repent so you can more fully and deeply participate in the strange life that God shares with us.
Fast and pray and repent to participate in loosing the bonds of injustice, breaking the yoke and setting the oppressed free.
Fast and pray and repent so your light breaks forth like the dawn, so your healing springs up quickly, so forgiveness and compassion can flow freely.
Fast and pray and give so you can sense God guiding you, satisfying your needs, pouring out the upside-down abundance of God’s kingdom into your lap.
The upside-down abundance of the kingdom is the secret Paul understood and wrote to the Corinthians about. Though he experienced “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger,” he also experienced “purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.” This ironic juxtaposition is further illuminated when he says that he and his apostolic companions are “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
Isn’t that weird? And yet it is true. This beautifully weird life that comes through death is our inheritance. The resurrection isn’t just a “happy ending” to the story. As my friend Chris Green says, “God raises the dead, but doesn’t prevent us from dying.”
You are going to die
So, beloved reader, you are going to die. We are all going to die. It is true that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” but that isn’t the final word, because in the incarnation of Jesus, our God has become dust, and so we will be raised from the dust to new life. We will live, even though we must die.
So, to answer Barbie’s question: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Yes, we do, on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, a season of walking the way of the cross, trusting that it is also the way of life and peace, just as it was for Jesus.
So we embrace weakness, vulnerability, and mortality on Ash Wednesday and throughout Lent, not to be morose or melancholy, but because we know that the weird, upside-down abundance of the kingdom is our inheritance. By embracing the truth of God’s weakness, vulnerability, and mortality, we enter into the life that is truly life, but comes only through death. So, though prayer, and fasting, and giving, let us lay hold of salvation and receive the grace of Lent.
Literally “Remember that you must die” in Latin.
The Barbie analogy is perfection.