Memento Mori

Psalm 20, 21:1-7, (8-14) • Psalm 110: 1-5 (6-7), 116, 117
Job 9:1, 10:1-9, 16-22 • Acts 11:1-18 • John 8:12-20

I have recently gotten a facsimile copy of Pickering’s unofficial Book of Common Prayer published in 1853. It is illustrated with intricate woodcuts from the 1500’s by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and others. The images are meant to be foci for visual devotion, enhancing the words of the prayers and providing some food for the sanctified imagination to digest.

The psalter illustrations are dedicated to the Dance of Death, a popular late medieval allegory for the inevitability of death for every person in every station of life. Every day twice a day, the faithful person who read from this book would have images of skeletons and sayings about death bordering the pages of his devotional text. Why would a prayer book have its readers confront such morbid images twice daily? We all die eventually. The more we are exposed to the thoughts of death through these memento mori, the more we can normalize and de-sensationalize it.

Psalm 116 is a great example of the ambivalence that every person feels about death. The psalmist first says in 116:2: “The cords of death entangled me; the grip of the grave took hold of me; I came to grief and sorrow.” But later in verse 13: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his servants.” Being able to live these emotions honestly is vital to forming that healthy relationship with death.

Outside of our tradition, we see the wider culture’s treatment of death: the deathbed is feared so much that we are likely to go to heroic efforts to afford someone another chance. After the lifesaving procedures have failed, the most comforting thing we can hear upon someone’s death is that they left this world peacefully, that they were ready. We as a culture hold that clutching and releasing in tension.

I believe that Pickering chose deathly images in one of the most used sections of the Book of Common Prayer to allow the faithful ample time to contemplate and accept their end. In what way do we honor our relationship to death in this time? What do we need to pray about to help us accept death before resurrection?

Written by Haley Hixson

Remembering that this isn’t the first time that humanity has been through grim times sometimes helps me cope with the current Covid-19 pandemic. If you haven’t had your fill of spookiness, check out the Danse macabre (Saint-Saëns) of 1874, which centered around the spirits that rise up on Halloween, and was described as “too anxiety provoking” for its original audience.