Where is Thy Sting?

If you’re a regular reader of terra incongita, you’ll know that over the last few months on this blog, we’ve been spending some time exploring the nature of the church. The theological way of describing what we’ve been up to is to say “we’ve been doing some ecclesiology,” and man have we covered some wide-ranging ground. This is a popular-level pastor’s blog, of course, not a theology textbook, so I’ve taken some liberty to think well outside the box as we’ve explored the theological nature of this strange organism called “the church.” We’ve imagined the church as a comet, the church as a game of Calvinball, the church as an angel, and the church as a comedy sketch. Before we close the book on this series, however, there is one more angle I’d like to come at it from, because there is an important function that church once had in culture that we are increasingly neglecting, to the point, I worry, of being in dereliction of duty.

The church is also, or at least, was meant to be, a memento mori. Memento Mori is Latin for “reminder of death,” and in medieval times, the memento mori was an object, maybe a skull or an urn, or more likely a painting of a skull or an urn, kept in a prominent place, that reminded the owner, whenever he saw it, that he was in fact, mortal and that he would, in fact, die.

The idea behind the memento mori, is that there can be something profoundly cathartic in remembering one’s mortality and, more importantly, it can inspire us to live our lives well, today, knowing that we may not have the chance to do so tomorrow.

I sound morbid. I know.

But that’s part of the problem I’m trying to put my finger on. Our culture generally is a death-denying culture. We want our meat not to bear too close a resemblance to the dead animal it is. We want our cemeteries to look like city parks, and be euphemistically stylized as “memorial gardens.” We want funerals called “celebrations of life,” lest anyone be forced to dwell too literally on the plain fact of death. And, by and large, the church has capitulated to the death-denying pressures of the world around us. We’ve cleaned up our hymns, we’ve moved the cemeteries off our grounds, we’ve out-sourced the funerals to “funeral homes” and we’ve found all sorts of spiritual-sounding ways of talking around the subject.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Time was you walked past the graves of the dearly departed on your way into church. Time was confessing “the communion of saints” with the creed included a very solid belief that one day we would join them. Time was hymns were replete with references, sometimes quite taunting references, to death. Time was the church was quite clear on its duty to help folks experience a “glorious death” (and we understood that for death to be, in fact, glorious, it must first be remembered, and confronted as a plain fact of life.)

I sound like an old fuddy duddy. I know.

But it’s only because I think there is something neurotic, or at least potentially neurotic, in our culture’s squeamishness about death, and I wonder if the spiritual ennui, the consumeristic vacuity, the manic hunt for the next thrill that seems so wide-spread in our culture isn’t somehow connected to our inability to come to terms with our own mortality.

If I’m on to something here, perhaps, as we continue thinking outside the box about the church, perhaps one of the ways to address the spiritual ennui, the consumeristic vacuity of contemporary North American culture is by regaining the church’s role as a memento mori.

I’m thinking John Keating here, not Eeyore, but I’m also thinking about the fact that only the man who is ready to die can truly live, and that the gospel, rightly understood, doesn’t deny the fact of death but wrestles with it, wrestles it to the ground, and brings it into submissive service to the Lord who conquered it in the cross.

Put differently, it is impossible to taunt death with the ringing victory cry of the Christian—death where is thy sting?—without also, at the same time, looking it dead in the eye and acknowledging that it's there.