Memento Mori: Embracing Endings & New Beginnings

By: Kierstin Richter, Editor

As a culture, we build our lives as if we were invincible, living in a world of ruins of empires who once believed they were eternal. We get the house, the car, the expensive clothes - we build our lives and identities upon things that will not last. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the things we take for granted can easily be taken away, such as a movie out with friends, seeing your loved ones in the nursing home or coming together to celebrate and dance. This isn’t the first time in history the world has looked like this. The ones who have come before us know all too well the struggles we’re facing (besides how to operate a Zoom call).

In the grim wake of a plague, famine, and a hundred year war, a rich culture of art and literature was born nearly half a millennium ago. The phrase, “Memento Mori,” or “remember you will die,” united artists and philosophers in a collective experience that someday we would all return to dust. It inspired a whole chapter of art history that depicted skulls, dying flowers, empty bottles of wine and hourglasses nearing their last grain of sand.

If this sounds morbid to you, you are not in the minority. One’s perspective on this art genre could understandably be different based on his or her outlook on life as he or she lives it. To one who has much to lose, it’s devastating. But to one who looks ahead to a bountiful peace and non-attachment to things of this world, it’s somewhat comforting.

Of course, skeletons and hourglasses stretched across a canvas may seem unsettling and gruesome at first glance. But look deeper and see the hidden meanings in these artistic elements. A painting in this style, or as a subgenre, a “vanitas still life,” would incorporate elements such as skulls to reflect the certainty of death, bubbles for the “brevity and fragility of life and earthly glory,” smoke and watches to show time is ticking and musical instruments to portray the ephemeral, fleeting nature of the beauty of today. What makes something beautiful is the potential for it to be taken away. Artists like Albrecht, Durer, Rembrandt, and Damien Hirst have all incorporated the vanitas style into their works.

The Dance Macabre or “dance of death” became popular in late Medieval Times and early Renaissance. These pieces may depict a skeleton walking, dancing, or playing music with anyone, whether it be the pope, a peasant or a small child. It encompassed the universality of death and that no one is exempt. Class or status here may divide us in our mortality, but beyond, death hasn’t the faintest regard for our perceptions of status.

The purpose of the style was not to discourage or devastate people into depression or to ruminate on the sadness of loss. It was more so a moral instruction to not waste your life on frivolous and meaningless pursuits, and treasure it until the day you may greet death like an old friend.

Although there is debate of the origins of the phrase and philosophy, one tells of an 18th century order of trappist monks called “The Order of the Hermits of Saint Paul,” later known as the “Brothers of the Dead.” This order took the whole death theme to the extreme, as criticized by others. Scapulars with skulls and crossbones, the tradition of kissing a skull at the foot of the cross before each meal and the phrase “memento mori” emblemed on the seal in each brother’s cell, were all elements of their monastic style.

They greeted each other in silence, with the reverence of the phrase, though they did not verbalize it. But it was a constant reminder among the brothers in everything they did. The Trappist monks were a branch of Cistercian monks, a reformed branch of the Benedictines who wanted to live the rule of Saint Benedict more authentically. In the book A Time to Keep Silence, author Patrick Leigh Fermor writes, “symbols of death and dissolution confronted the eye at every turn, and in the refractory, the beckoning torso of a painted skeleton, equipped with an hourglass and a scythe, leant with the terrifying archness of a forgotten guest, across the coping of a wall which were inscribed the words: ‘tonight, perhaps?”

A monastery, “la Val Sainte” in Switzerland, houses similar decor in the middle of their dining hall, which bears a white wood cross with a skull. Another in France inscribes the words “hodie mihi, cras tibi” or “Today I die, tomorrow it will be you,” above the entrance to the cemetery.

Although the persistent reminder of death may seem unnecessary and dreary, it also encompasses a much larger theme the monks live just as freely, and that is to cultivate a living relationship with the Trinity, in which one lives in communion and fellowship both now and in eternity. It isn’t to waste away today thinking about the sorrows of tomorrow, but rather to embrace the life we hold today because of the eternity we may face sooner than we think.

There are several orders of monks with remains of the dead present, a few being the Capuchins, Franciscans, and the Cistercians. An Ossuary, or a crypt beneath the church, is an element of their monastic life, holding the remains of the dead so they may not be abandoned. The Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini at the Via Veneto in Rome houses a Capuchin crypt with six chapels, five of them covered with skeletal remains of their capuchin brothers before them. The crypt was built in the 1630s at the request of Pope Urban VII so they would not be abandoned. There are an estimated 4,000 skeletons collected between the 1520s and 1870s. A plaque inside reads, “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.” A similar “bone church” in Prague called the Sedlec Ossuary is decorated with the remains of 40,000 people. So why the sudden jump in popularity?

One Cistercian monk brought back dirt from Golgotha (the hill on which Christ was crucified) after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He sprinkled it in the cemetery at the monastery, and people were just dying to get a spot there. When the plague hit, the demand for burial plots was overwhelming, so when they ran out of room, they began taking the extra skeletons inside the crypts of the church. Definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be in charge of that job.

Of all the religious orders that revere death, the Dominicans are deemed the “best order in which to die.” The Dominicans pray for the dead frequently and have a second round of celebrations the week after All Saints Day and All Souls Day. When a Dominican dies, all the priests in the province say a Mass for him, and they pray the “De Profundis” before main meals in remembrance of all who have died on that day. Their black capes are a physical reminder of this mortality, and Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau says this undertone brings about a “sense of union and community that endures into the next life.” He explains it is not meant to be macabre or depressing, but “something hopeful and joyful, that this veil of tears is not the end of our existence; it’s not the goal.”

In our culture, we look at death as an end. We see it as a vast oblivion that’s hard to comprehend any kind of eternity past it. Sure, we use the clichés of “Oh, she’s in a better place now” or “We’ll see each other again,” but the realistic thought apart from any euphamisms we may be told, is that we are scared. We don’t embrace it, so we don’t think about it. Although it’s something we will all experience, it’s not something we usually talk about realistically, because really, who could give us an honest answer about what lies ahead? If they knew, why in the world are they still hanging around?

In the wake of the death of those we love, we feel cheated. Broken. Beaten. We wonder why terrible things happen, and we blame ourselves for not being able to cope with it. We push the thoughts of death out of our mind when really; the freedom lies in dying to ourselves every day. We die to ourselves by dying to the vices that control us - dying to the seasons that no longer serve God. One vice we never seem to die to is the need to be in control, and we kill ourselves slowly with judgment, resentment, and the all too human urge to ruminate on the thoughts that drain and destroy us.

As we get older, we just slowly lose interest in subscribing to the annoyances and pettiness of everyday things. We no longer feel the need to respond to that argumentative person on Facebook or engage in debates over things that don’t matter. We learn to let go and die to the need to always be right or always have a say. Ego is one heck of a drug. But dying to the pride that makes us want to engage is a freedom in sobriety in itself.

We die many times over the course of our lives. We die to our ego. We die to pride. We die to ourselves. To embrace the never-ending transformation of the death of ourselves, which is what Jesus calls us to do, we must do so consistently to truly live in Christ. This isn’t a one and done deal. We must make a choice every day to humble ourselves for the sake of holiness.

But humility isn’t something we just pick up. We must go to the full depth of things. We have to hit the bottom. Feel the ground. Feel the utter pain of failure to learn vulnerability - to learn how to allow God to come into our hearts and lift us back up again. To truly come to know Christ, we must die in all the areas in our life that feed ourselves and allow Christ to fill up the empty spaces we create.

Memento Mori isn’t just about remembering someday we will be in the ground. It’s also about the every day and the embrace of letting go. It’s about the mortality of the beauty that surrounds us. God uses what would destroy you to transform you. Life isn’t fair. Life is painful. But God comes to you disguised in all of that. This is where we grow. This is where we die. But it is also where we heal.