Apart from Stoicism, which seems to be having a revival, are there any places where you see a devotional sense of memento mori reflected in popular culture? It strikes me that there’s a lot of overlap between someone like St. Salyer: I want to circle back to the relationship you mentioned between prayer and thoughtfulness. My version revises the prayer slightly to include a step in which a person explicitly can bring death to mind and pray with it in the context of faith. Based on a method of prayer promoted by a 16 th-century Spanish saint, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the examen helps us to offer God praise and gratitude, identify areas of weakness where we need God’s help, and to ask for grace for the future. One method I include in all my books is The Memento Mori Daily Examen. It doesn’t matter how we do it as much as that we do it. It mostly involves simply bringing the idea of your eventual death to God in prayer. Sometimes people get really concerned about meditating on death correctly, but meditating on death is very simple.
That’s why it’s important to consciously integrate memento mori as a practice into one’s life. We can easily turn reminders of death into white noise if they don’t prompt us to prayer and deep thought. Saint Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, exhorted his monks in his Rule to “keep death daily before one’s eyes.” Daily, regular meditation on death is what helps keep memento mori personal. Theresa Aletheia Noble, FSP, with memento mori Nick Staresinic I recently spoke with Sister Theresa Aletheia about the form’s contemporary resonance. It points toward memento mori’s relationship between recognizing the fact of mortality and inviting us into the process of self-examined living that death discloses. But her second name, Aletheia, means ‘disclosure’ as well as ‘fact’ in Greek. The New York Times, for example, recently profiled author and modern-day maker of memento mori, Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, as ‘ the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die.’ It’s true, she does.
In recent years, the rediscovery of Catholicism’s traditional forms of art, liturgy, and culture – often in surprising new iterations – has brought about renewed interest in the practice. The form’s secular origins date to the Stoics, but focusing on the ‘Last Things’ has also been a longstanding part of Catholic ascetic practice and devotion. Artistically, death is always a mode of self-portraiture, but memento mori seeks to catalyze the shock of recognition as a means of contemplating a more virtuous life.
An inscription over the entrance reminds the living on behalf of the dead that ‘our bones await your bones.’ The chapel’s mirror effect is a core compositional principle in memento mori art. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images) Getty ImagesĪt Portugal’s Capela dos Ossos, Franciscan monks decorated the chapel walls with intricate patterns of 5,000 human bones and skulls. The Capela dos Ossos, where human skulls and bones cover the interior walls, was built in the 16th century by a Franciscan monk who, in the Counter-Reformation spirit of that era, wanted to prod his fellow brothers into contemplation and transmit the message of life being transitory. of Bones) reads in Portuguese Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos (We bones that are here, await yours) on Septemin Evora, Portugal. EVORA, PORTUGAL - SEPTEMBER 30: The famous warning at the entrance of the Capela dos Ossos (Chapel.
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