Day by day remind yourself
that you are going to die.
+ St. Benedict
Along with The Deep Down Things by Amber and Seth Haines, Beholding by Strahan Coleman, and Deep Down Faith by Cornelius Planting Jr., Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer has been another wonder-filled book I am grateful to begin 2024 with, particularly as we step into the season of Lent on this Ash Wednesday.
Before I share why Practicing the Way has been a good read in preparing for Lent, here is a reflection I returned to again to help me remember the reasons the sobriety of Ash Wednesday is good to enter into each year:
Lent beckons us to consider our
true state of existence
apart from God.
Apart from Christ,
our lives are marinated in mess
and crumple into darkness and ash.
This is the vivid reminder
of Ash Wednesday
with its imposition of ashes
onto our foreheads.
Lent creates a space for becoming
more fully abandoned to God,
and the heart of Lent
is identification with Christ.
It invites intimate familiarity
with Christ’s humility, trials, and death.
This type of dying demands a posture
of humility and unconcealed neediness
before God.
Limitless or Limited?
In a 21st century western culture, we don't have many opportunities to meditate on death and we often don't appreciate a lowly posture of neediness. More likely, we try to avoid death with our elevation of youth and focus on external beauty, AI, and medicine.
One recent streaming show that wrestled with this tension in some helpful ways was National Geographic's Limitless featured on Disney+. While the first six episodes focused on how to elongate life with host Chris Hemsworth, the last episode was about facing the inevitability of death.
Ash Wednesday is its own memento mori in that it reminds us that as human beings, we have limitations and we will one day die. Other human beings who came before us, including St. Benedict, had memento moris to keep a sense of their human limitations ever before them in an effort to carpe diem, seize the day.
To elaborate more on this, here are some helpful considerations from John Mark Comer in Practicing the Way.
What's Your Memento Mori?
The skull.
It's staring at me now, its hollow eye sockets boring into my soul, refusing to let me avoid the ultimate human reality: death.
It could be half a century from now or half an hour, but I am going to die, as are you. The stats are pretty compelling: near 100 percent. The reaper is coming for us all.
Hence the skull on my office desk.
No, no it's not real;
no need to call a
mental health professional.
But still,
it calls for a little backstory ...
In the sixth century, a monk named Benedict wrote the now famous Rule of St. Benedict, the founding document of one of the oldest monastic orders in the world. In it, he gave this advice to his fellow monks:
Day by day
remind yourself
that you are going to
die.
Does this sound a bit masochistic
to your modern ears?
I imagine, yes.
But in context,
Benedict was essentially saying,
"Don't waste your life
on triviality.
Remember what matters.
Life is fleeting
and precious.
Don't squander it.
Keep your death
before your eyes.
Hold eternity
in your heart.
Benedict was urging the monks
to be joyfully present to the
miracle of daily life.
Long before the skull was the trademark aesthetic of punk rock bands, motorcycle gangs, or Hollywood pirates, it was the visual motif of Christian monks. For centuries, monks would go into their cells and kneel on prayer benches with three items spread before them:
+ a portion of Scripture
+ a candle
(to read said Scripture)
+ a skull
Not a skull bought on Etsy, as mine is, but a real one — likely from a previous denizen of the monastery: "my old roommate, Brother Makarios."
The skull was a daily reminder that life is fleeting; don't miss it.
To this day, Benedictine monks wear black robes — not because they are trying to be chic but because they view the life of discipleship as a kind of preparation for death, for an eternity with God.
Benedictine monasteries often have their own cemeteries, as their monks take vows of stability and pledge to remain in the community until their death. Certain monasteries intentionally leave the next grave pre-dug, so that every day, as the monks walk by the plot, they remember, I'm going to join my brothers soon.
Archeologists have even discovered ancient catacombs with this saying carved into the wall above the ossuary:
What you are now,
we used to be.
What we are now,
you will be.
So, the skull.
On my desk.
My attempt to remind myself
I'm going to die.
It's there because in any age, but especially in ours, it's incredibly easy to waste our lives. "Amusing ourselves to death," as the social critic Neil Postman called it, has never been more convenient. You can disappear into the black hole of Netflix, become a workaholic in pursuit of riches or fame, or simply "eat, drink, and be merry" in the adult playground of the modern city. Western culture is arguably built around the denial of death through the coping mechanism of distraction. As Ronald Rolheiser put it, "We are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion."
But — not to put a damper on things — you will eventually die. We all will. And when that day comes and your friends and family stand around your grave, what will matter is who you became.
New York Times columnist David Brooks famously distinguished between "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues."
Résumé Virtues
What we talk about in life
—
where we work,
what we've accomplished,
what accolades we've received,
and so on.
Eulogy Virtues
are what others talk about
when we die —
namely, the people we were,
the fabric that made up
our character,
and the relationships that
defined our sojourn
on this earth.
To "remind yourself
that you are going to die"
is to remind yourself to live
for your eulogy,
not your résumé.
It's to not waste
your precious,
fleeting time here
but to focus on what matters
in the grand scheme of
eternity —
becoming a person of love
through union with Jesus.
Benedict was an apprentice of Jesus who, in time, became a bona fide saint. Like a true apprentice, he saw our years in the body as a kind of training ground for eternity. That ultimately, what we're learning is how to become a person of love ...
a person who is like Jesus.
+ John Mark Comer
pgs. 66-68
Links to other Lenten posts:
With anticipation and joy,
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