Remember Your Death
Remember Your Death
This November, sharpen your focus on life's last things with the desert mystics.
“Heat Kills!” the sign screeched at us, as panting, red-faced hikers streamed past us toward the parking lot, exhausted from the three-mile trek we had not yet begun. “Avoid the heat. Hike early or late. Drink water: two liters per person. Use caution.”
Our family was twelve-hundred miles into a two-thousand-mile road trip from Missouri to California, taking our time in moving to our new home in the thick of the pandemic. Everything we owned was loaded on a moving truck that wouldn’t arrive at our new digs for three more days. My husband and I figured it was the perfect opportunity to see the red-rock wonderland of Arches National Park in eastern Utah.
We had been warned to get an early start if we wanted to make the nearly five-hundred-foot climb to iconic Delicate Arch safely. The high temperature would hit one-hundred-twenty degrees that July day, and Arches hikers had been known to die when unprepared for the heat.
A mix-up with our breakfast order got us off to a late start and we didn’t reach the parking lot until 9 a.m., when many hikers were already heading home. The temps were still in the low nineties, though, and we had plenty of water. So we lathered the kids in sunscreen, paused dutifully at the warning signs, then started uphill, rocks crunching underfoot as we squinted at a cloudless horizon dotted with amazing arches and teetering hoodoos and zero shade.
Not far from the trailhead, we veered left to see the remains of Wolfe Ranch, a deserted homestead built by a Civil War veteran who had chosen this forbidding spot to graze his cattle. As our six-person family peered through the windows of the ghostly one-room cabin that once housed his six-person family, I wondered whatever became of them. Their sagging split-rail fence and forlorn wagon looked ominous in the sun’s glare. I would have shuddered but it was too hot.
“We need to get moving,” I said to my husband, tapping my watch. “Before it gets too late.”
Ignoring the fact that those sounded like the opening lines of a bad horror film where all the dumb characters die, I rustled our little hikers back to the trail, reminding myself that plenty of others were starting out at this hour. At least we wouldn’t die alone.
Ten minutes later, after my daughters and I had pulled far enough ahead of my husband and sons that it looked like we weren’t together, a haggard woman coming down the hill frowned at me.
“You ladies have water?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, my husband has it, thanks,” I said, making a mental note to stick closer to him and his backpack full of bottles.
I signaled to the girls to slow down and turned to survey the rust-colored hill of hikers below me, resting my hands on my hips as I sucked in a mouthful of hot air. Winded but barely sweating in the dry air, my chest pounded as a breeze rippled past. It felt like the blast of a dozen hair dryers.
So this is hot, I thought. Desert hot.
We took a water break soon after, and another soon after that. The kids mostly stayed in good spirits—thanks to frequent hydration and some gallows humor about our impending demise—and we ascended the main hill in decent time. Not as fast as the Olympic-caliber jogger who sprinted up the trail as if it were air-conditioned. Not as slow as the young couple in flimsy sandals with toddlers in tow, whom I felt sure we’d have to rescue on our way down. We made it in time, our time, and seeing the park’s largest freestanding arch in person was worth it.
We returned to our minivan less than two hours after our start, tired and dusty but bursting with satisfaction and some choice family photos. We even learned a few things. The kids finally understood why I was always warning them to mind the gaps after watching Joseph’s water bottle slip out of his hands and tumble hundreds of feet to the bottom of a sandstone basin near Delicate Arch. And I finally understood why the ancient desert monks were always talking about death.
Death, in the desert, is a constant presence. Like the eerie spectacle of that abandoned ranch, reminders of death’s inevitability are everywhere in the desert. The sun that seems like a welcome friend in muddy Missouri becomes a silent, stalking foe in a place where water is all but absent and traces of creatures that perished before you lurk around every bend. Slogging through that scorching hike, and driving two days later through the boiling, windswept Mojave Desert—just weeks before nearby Death Valley reached one-hundred-thirty degrees, the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth—I could see why death might be on your mind in the desert. And why, if you wanted death on your mind, the desert was the place to go.
“The desert shatters the soul’s arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger,” writes Christian psychologist Dan B. Allender. “In the desert we trust God or die.”
The desert fathers and mothers knew that truth, and what’s more, they knew that the dependence on God we feel so acutely in the desert is actually the truth of our human condition all the time. So they consciously cultivated that awareness, not merely by venturing out to the desert but by meditating on their mortality once they got there—every day, even every hour, and in detail.
“With the fear of God before our eyes, let us be ever mindful of death,” says Anthony of Egypt, whose parting advice to his monks was to “live as though you were going to die each day.” Sarah of the Desert counsels the same: “Be as though you were dead: Do not care about human dishonor; nor about worldly glory; in stillness, retreat into your cell; continually remember only God and death, and you will be saved.” “Shut yourself in a tomb as though you were already dead,” says desert father John Colobos, “so that at all times you will think death is near.” Ammon of Egypt recommends that we “meditate like the criminals in prison … [who] keep asking, ‘Where is the judge, when will he come?’” Evagrius of Pontus takes it a step farther, urging us to visualize the decay of our bodies, our final judgment, and what comes next:
Remember also what happens in hell, and think about the state of the souls down there, their painful silence, their most bitter groanings, their fear, their strife, their waiting. … Consider also the good things in store for the righteous: confidence in the face of God the Father and his Son, the angels and archangels and all the people of the saints, the kingdom of heaven, and the gifts of that realm, joy and beatitude. Remember well these two realities. … Whether you are inside or outside your prayer chamber, be careful that you never forget these things, so that you may at least flee wrong and harmful thoughts.
Such talk may sound strange, even spooky, to us. To the desert monks, it sounded realistic. None of us is getting out of here alive. If we really believe the faith we profess—in which the gift of eternal life and our freedom to accept or reject that gift is central—why wouldn’t we focus regularly on that reality? Why wouldn’t we take time daily, even hourly, to check our internal compass and make sure it’s pointing in the direction we ultimately want to go?
That’s exactly what the desert monks advised—and did. “A man eager for salvation thinks of death and the judgment in the same way that a starving man thinks of bread,” says John Climacus of Sinai, who quips that while the man who ponders death daily is admirable, “the man who gives himself to it by the hour is surely a saint.” Marcarius of Egypt cites “the remembrance of death at every hour” as one of three keys to intimacy with God, while desert mother Sarah says her journey toward transforming union with Christ entails continual meditation on death: “I place my foot on the ladder and set death in front of my eyes before I go up with it.” An anonymous desert elder wove this remembrance into his daily work routine: “I sew away, and at each piece of sackcloth, I set death before my eyes before I repeat [the stitching].”
The desert monks didn’t invent the practice of meditating on mortality. It goes back to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates defines philosophy as “nothing else than the study of dying and being dead.” Seneca says we should “study death always,” “order our minds as if we had come to the very end,” and “balance life’s accounts every day.” “Keep death … before your eyes day and night,” advises Epictetus; “then you will never have any base thought or excessive desire.”
In Scripture, this common-sense concept is infused with transcendent purpose. “Lord, let me know my end, the number of my days, that I may learn how frail I am,” says the psalmist, who pleads that God would “teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart” (Ps. 39:5, 90:12). The counsel is more direct in Sirach: “In whatever you do, remember your last days, and you will never sin. … Remember death and decay, and cease from sin!” (Sir. 7:36, 28:6).
The practice that would come to be known as memento mori (Latin for “remember death”) grew widespread in the Middle Ages and early modern times. It spawned an entire art genre—vanitas still life paintings, which featured skulls, hourglasses, and other reminders of death—as well as death-themed music, jewelry, literature, even clocks. Skulls became a staple in portraits of everyone from early Church fathers and medieval Catholic saints to Puritan leaders in colonial America. Even today, thought largely forgotten, reminders of this ancient discipline surface in unlikely places, from the tattoos of the young men driving an online revival of stoic philosophy to the books of atheist-turned-Catholic-nun Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, who has made popularizing memento mori a personal mission.
Some forms of interest in memento mori are surely healthier than others; as John Climacus argued more than a millennia ago, not every desire for death is good. For a Christian, though, to remember death is to remember God. So ruminations on the last things are more motivating than morbid, a means of pruning away worries and concerns unworthy of our attention. The fear of God fueled by prayerful meditation on death is a gift of the Holy Spirit that Scripture characterizes as a “delight” (Isa. 11:3) and “the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). It is not a “servile fear” but a “filial fear,” Jesuit theologian John Hardon notes, which may begin with dread of punishment but ultimately “is based on the selfless love of God, whom it shrinks from offending,” just as a child shrinks from offending a beloved parent.
Rather than distancing us from God, this holy fear strengthens our hope of heaven and liberates us from the distraction of dreading anything other than separation from God, which Jesus says is the only thing we really need to fear (Matt. 10:28). “The man who has death before his eyes at all times overcomes cowardice,” says an anonymous desert elder. He’s also more likely to defeat distraction, given how many fears hide behind our high-tech diversions.
This week, as our spiritually starved culture falls headlong into Halloween mania and election hysterics, we can do something truly countercultural and reflect—prayerfully, peacefully, purposely—on death. We can cast a discerning eye over our daily preoccupations and ask with saint and monk Bernard of Clairvaux: “What is this in light of eternity?”
That question won’t exempt us from the heartaches and hassles of daily life. Unlike the desert mystics, most of us must live in the thick of the world, not on its periphery. But pondering the last things can reorient us in our disorienting times, just as it reoriented the desert saints in theirs.
“Let your mind be always on the kingdom of heaven,” desert father Hyperichius says, “and you will soon inherit it.” It’s as good a plan as any for a month dedicated to praying for the dead and to preparing for our own passage from the desert of this world to our true and lasting home.
