memento vivere
Keep death daily before your eyes….
The rule of Saint Benedict has both beauty and wisdom weaved into its lines.
But this famous line, I’m starting to think, is not part of that wisdom.
The idea is that to memento mori propels us to carpe diem.
Saints and sages have long utilized this practice to purge their hearts and turn their attentions and affections to that which is above and deeper within. To meditate on your death was to remember the importance of the living forward into the hope of resurrection life. It gave a shape to the container of life in this world and pushed the monastic tradition to form some of the most beautiful and loving people to ever exist.
So with great trepidation and humility, I would suggest that for us today this advice is wrong.
Are we hurtling towards death or are we living out of our birth?
Most would see the space rock we occupy that swings around a ball of fire in a vast cosmos or the inevitable laws of entropy that apply to all or the proclivity of humans from page 1 to lean into their death as signs of the mortality paradigm pervading all. Indeed, you don’t have to read deep into a history book, ancient text, or popular novel (from the Fault in our Stars to a good Michael Crichton novel) to read the human condition as synonymous to death.
Death shapes most fear in life as subjects like disease, war, and crime reach our ears. It makes itself known to most before they reach adulthood in the loss of a relative or friend. It even intrudes on the space of Birth all too often as the ultimate, unanswerable question of why chokes out our dreams and hope for life.
It’s no wonder so many have found it necessary to turn to mortality as a practice to reckon with our frailty. Therapy aids the process, opening windows to the harsh reality of death. The Christian tradition fuels our “death-trospection”, giving an icon of the Cross as a symbol of our Way (more on this in a bit). Death is a hot topic again in the 21st century as cafés and blogs write about its importance and the way our systems, from medical to political, encourage conversation about our ends.
And these are not completely negative.
Death’s reality is a palliative for poor existential framing.
Some are held back by their fear of death, others are unable to confront and say goodbye to those who need release, and more need to remember we cannot overcome death (the drive to persist is futile at best & all-consuming vanity at worst).
But in all these cases, a palliative is no cure.
These mortally-focused worldviews create dilemmas within the one-sided nature of their narrative about reality.
See so much of the end as our ever-present reality and we find roads to make it so.
In a world that can naturally lean toward chaos (tohu va-bohu in the Hebrew), living lives with an anchor in the end brings its fruit unnaturally close. Jennifer Banks reflects on our mortal drive stating,
The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place… Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech…
Through pain, we need to discover that the counter-balance to mortality is not hedonism—living it up in our time to focus only on the present— but the concept of natality and its experience with us all…
Consider each of these well-worn death aphorisms flipped to manifest the change natality creates:
From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth…
Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born…
The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing…
Keep birth daily before your eyes…
Birth is evidence of our freedom...
The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth…
The elliptical nature of each of these affirmations provide the paradigm shift— from death to life, from destruction to creation, from non-existence to artistic-creation. And natality offers a way to each of these blessings, if we can understand it’s philosophical underpinnings…
