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CRAS TIBI

I remember kneeling down closer to make out the Latin inscription on the grave stone, as we all walked about the Charter St. Cemetery in Salem. This particular stone belonged to Christian Hunter (died March 18, 1676), the first wife of Captain Richard More, the only one of the Mayflower Pilgrims to take up residence in and be buried in Salem, MA.

The words etched just below the primitively macabre winged-skull read, "HODIE MIHI, CRAS TIBI". My Latin is a little rusty, so thanks to Google I was able to translate into the sobering English phrase: "Today me, tomorrow you." It's one of those things that stops you in your tracks and cuts through all the layers of "stuff" that constantly occupies our minds and hearts. It makes me think of what the writer of Ecclesiastes said (Ecc 7:2):
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting,for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.
As one pastor I know summarized it: "It's better to go to a funeral than to a party..." because at the funeral you see what really matters.

This can come across as morbid, even depressing. In our day, we like to be more positive, and this doesn't sound very uplifting. The uplifting, encouraging, and simple are presented as the serum for the bite of reality. But generations past knew this humbling truth well. It was embedded in culture, as another Latin phrase found its way into the art world: "memento mori" or "remember death." It was an instruction to remember the imminence of death.

Blah. So, why bring up such a topic on the morning after a long holiday weekend? What a downer! I bring it up because although the weekend was hopefully amazing for all of us, it was a holiday weekend that memorializes death -death through sacrifice. And yet restlessness still abounds within us. It's part of our condition. Time runs through our fingers so quickly, and we are tempted to want to hold onto it to make it last longer. We stress about what is to come and beat ourselves up for not doing what we should have done. This topic's honesty demands that we hit pause for moment.

The author of the book Living Life Backwards (David Gibson) gets to the heart of the matter when he tells us that this truth is actually not as morbid and morose as we might first make it. While there is a taste of sadness to it, it's a freeing truth that cuts the chains of our tireless pursuit of novelty. We can get off the treadmill of always trying to attain the next great thing that we think will finally make everything better, and we can start enjoying what we have and receive from above, looking forward to the age to come when all things are made new.
Gibson says it much better than I can:
Death can radically enable us to enjoy life. By relativizing all that we do in our days under the sun, death can change us from people who want to control life for gain into people who find deep joy in receiving life as a gift. This is the main message of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell: life in God’s world is gift, not gain.

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