Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:8-13
New York City is one of my favorite places, but our relationship had a rocky beginning. My first visit there took place in the early 1980s when I was a law student. A prospective employer had summoned me to the Big Apple for a job interview and I was nervous. Most of my anxiety centered around money, or rather my lack of it.
I had very little cash on hand, and my wallet contained a single credit card so overburdened with debt that every time a new charge was approved a bell rang and an angel got its wings. But my prospective employer had covered lots of the costs in advance, and I was eager to expand my horizons, so I girded my loins and boarded the plane, dressed in the brand new blue polyester suit that I had purchased on sale at Sears.
I got into the city early, so I decided to treat myself to breakfast at an unassuming looking diner. I plopped myself down and ordered my favorite: three eggs, buttered toast, bacon, and orange juice—you know, the “heart smart” selection. And that’s a good thing because my heart almost stopped when the waitress brought me the bill.
It was way more than I had ever paid for any meal, but what shocked me most was the very big charge for my very small glass of very ordinary orange juice: nine dollars. In that moment, I had a kind of religious experience. In the back of my head, I could hear my mother’s thrifty Scottish ancestors sobbing in despair over the idea of a nine dollar orange juice. And, when I handed my depleted credit card to the waitress, I closed my eyes and I prayed for yet another miracle.
In the forty years that have followed, I have been to New York City countless times and have come to love it, although PTSD prevents me from ordering orange juice there. Among other things, I love its many glorious museums, including a somewhat lesser-known one in Upper Manhattan called “the Cloisters.” The Cloisters consists of segments of two medieval French monasteries that John D. Rockefeller purchased, had disassembled, shipped to New York, and had reassembled there in a lovely parkland setting.
The Cloisters specializes in the art of the Middle Ages, and it holds a remarkable collection of paintings, sculptures, and other treasures from that era. Even if you’ve never visited, you’ve probably seen pictures of its famous tapestries of unicorns. In the spring and summer, you can tour the museum’s gardens, which feature plants that people in the Middle Ages used for cooking, medicine, the occasional bit of witchcraft, and to poison their enemies.
One of the most beautiful spaces in the Cloisters is gallery nine, a lovely Gothic chapel with stained glass windows. This gallery includes a number of tombs (in essence, stone coffins) that have lids with effigies—sculpted depictions of the person who lies interred within them. One of these effigies portrays a sleeping knight from a distinguished French family, his sword and shield by his side, his feet comfortably resting on an effigy of his loyal dog.
The last time we visited this gallery, Lisa called me over to see something that had caught her attention. It was a frame on the far wall of the chapel. When I looked more closely at the frame, I realized that it held a mirror. And, when I looked more closely at the mirror, I saw that it had writing across it. The writing said: “Everything will be taken away.”
It was a sobering moment. There was my own face in the mirror, with the words “Everything will be taken away” written across it. And there in the reflection behind my face were the tombs and the effigies,
those stony reminders of the brevity and fragility of human life.
Buddhists talk about something they call “the Zen slap,” an experience that suddenly and unexpectedly jolts you out of your sleepy everyday existence and awakens you to the true nature of things. That phrase perfectly describes what I experienced in that moment. I felt as if I had been slapped right across the face with the heavy hand of my own mortality.
As I stared into that blurry mirror, I remembered that famous passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It seemed perfectly appropriate. Yes, the mirror has brought me a flash of profound, if not entirely welcome, insight. But, for now, I could see only “through a glass, darkly.”
I would have to wait to see things face-to-face, to know as I am known, to get answers to all the questions that bedevil and dog me. This is, in my experience, one of God’s favorite tricks: to bring us at the same time both illumination and mystery, bundled up together in one soul-stirring package. “Here,” God says, “think on this,” and he speaks to us in riddles and parables, as did His Son.
The mirror on the wall of gallery nine was designed by an American artist named Adrian Piper and it’s one of six such mirrors spread about at random locations within the Cloisters and its sister institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s particularly appropriate that one of these mirrors is located in the Cloisters, because it represents a fresh take on an idea that was popular in the Middle Ages—an idea called “memento mori.”
For those of you don’t know the phrase, “memento mori” is Latin for “remember your death.” The basic concept is that we will live different and better lives if we keep the fact of our mortality at the forefront of our minds, rather than storing it comfortably away in the cellars of our consciousness, as we are inclined to do. Memento mori invites us to meditate regularly on the reality of our inevitable death and to let it inform our thoughts, our choices, our decisions, and our actions. It’s powerful stuff.
In the Middle Ages, Christians who practiced memento mori often kept symbols of human mortality around them, like, for example, actual human skulls. You’ll be relieved to know that you do not need to go to such extremes to put the idea of memento mori to work in your life. I suspect that Marie Kondo, the lifestyle consultant who urges us to purge our home of objects that do not “spark joy,” might suggest that we begin by getting rid of any human skulls we happen to have lying around.
But the practice of memento mori should, indeed, “spark joy”—indeed, a very special kind of joy. The kind of joy that comes with understanding that life is a gift. The kind of joy that comes with remembering that each day is a blessing. The kind of joy that comes with recognizing that every single moment matters. Memento mori is not an occasion for grief, but for celebration—and a renewed sense of passion and purpose.This is why I have come to believe that while memento mori is a great thought, it is also an incomplete one. I say this because, you see, the real goal of memento mori is not to make us remember our death, but to make us remember our life. And memento mori summons us to remember our life so that we do not forget to live it.
To live it completely. To live it joyfully. To live it meaningfully. To live it enthusiastically—enthusiastically in the full meaning of the root of the word, “en theos,” filled with God. Filled with God’s light. Filled with God’s liberating spirit. Filled with God’s love. Filled with God’s hope.
Done this way, to remember our life is to remember His life. To remember what His life makes possible for us: “all things,” the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew tells us, “all things.” The novelist Doris Lessing wrote: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” Exactly so, Jesus says to us. “And I have never met an impossible condition I couldn’t make possible, even the triumph of life over death itself.”
In this way, the mirror at the Cloisters paradoxically has things exactly right and exactly wrong. Yes, in a sense everything will finally be taken away. But, in another sense, everything that matters will finally be given. Our daily task becomes to say, as Muhammad Ali famously said, that “impossible is nothing.”
These may seem like tall orders, especially to all of us who have been around a while and who life may have wearied a bit. But, in one of my favorite poems of hers, Mary Oliver offers this encouragement:
Be still my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
Though time is draining from the clock
And your walk, that was confident and quick,
Has become slow.
So, be slow if you must, but let
The heart still play its true part.
Love still as you once loved, deeply
And without patience.
Let God and the world
Know you are grateful
That the gift has been given.
Joseph Campbell wrote that “Hell is life drying up.” If that’s so, and I suspect that it is, then Paradise must be life freshly irrigated with an awareness of its preciousness. Life cultivated. And, then, life harvested.
Today marks the first Sunday in Lent. For many of us, this initiates a time when we seek a deeper spiritual connection as we prepare ourselves for Holy Week, for the poignancy of Good Friday, for the triumph of Easter. Some of us will give something up for Lent. Some of us will take something on. Some of us will pray for the simple strength to stay steady in turbulent times.
This morning, I want to suggest to you that you might make part of your Lenten practice to “remember your life.” To be “still” and “steadfast.” To “let your love still play its true part.” To “let God and the world know you are grateful that the gift has been given.”
Of course, life will retain its mysteries, as it must. Its great mysteries, like how we will ultimately experience our own resurrection into a new way of being. And its minor mysteries, like how any person of good conscience could charge nine dollars for a small glass of orange juice. As Paul says, for now we can see only through a glass, darkly.
But such light as we can get has a better chance of illuminating our existence if we make a conscious and consistent effort to let it in. To that end, may I respectfully suggest you start each day of Lent with this simple reflection: “Today, I will remember my life.”
“Today, I will remember my life.”
“Today, I will remember my life.”
Who knows where it might prompt you to knock? Who knows which doors it might quietly open? Who knows what it might allow you to see that you had not seen before?
Who knows what glimpse of the divine you might capture right there in the glorious messiness of this thing called life—from which everything is taken away, and to which everything is given?
Ah, praise the One who made it so.
And all the people said: Amen.