I’ll never be able to erase the bone church from my memory. The pure strangeness of it. In the early years of our marriage, my wife and I spent a month rambling around medieval villages in eastern Europe. There were gorgeous old towns clustered around fast-flowing streams and halfway up mountains, each with its own town square and Catholic church, each church with its own devotion to a quirky local saint or a miraculous story of its founding.
For young tourists, it was overwhelming. After a while, the soaring gothic architecture from town to town all starts to blend. It was too ambitious to try to take it in so quickly. The bone church, though. I’ll never forget it.
The church is exactly what it sounds like -- a church decorated entirely with human bones. The chandeliers are bones. The walls are bones. The artwork is bones.
It’s shocking, how many bones are there and how the church hasn’t hidden them away but, instead, spotlighted them. In that church, death is inescapable. It’s everywhere. But, although it’s highly unusual, the experience of being inside isn’t scary or macabre. One gets the sense that death isn’t the end, and the people who chose to be interred there had a strong faith in the life beyond this one. In that sacred place, the bones are alive to possibility.
Our destiny
The bone church is an extreme example of a spiritual devotion we might identify as memento mori. Death is always before our eyes and it’s part of our spirituality to remember our destiny. What those bones are, we will one day be.
The devotion of remembering our death isn’t for the purpose of curating depression or turning against life. Quite the opposite, we remember death in order to gain new appreciation for life, to not take our days for granted. We make the most of each moment.
Around the 16th century, a specific style of painting became popularized based on the memento mori, known as vanitas paintings. In a reference to Ecclesiastes, which begins with the declaration that, “All things are vanity,” the earliest vanitas paintings started out, quite straightforwardly, as paintings of skulls. They were simple but effective, only slightly less shocking than a church full of real bones or a priest’s black All Souls Day vestment with a skull and crossbones stitched into it.
Over time, the paintings became more elaborate. The skull maintained a prominent position, but additional symbols were introduced to remind viewers of the passing nature of life. If we are destined for eternity, then prioritizing power, prestige, and wealth in this world is a vain pursuit. Once you’re a skull, it won’t matter how smart you once were, or rich, or physically attractive, or that you had dinner at that really nice restaurant that one time.
The point isn’t that we cannot or should not enjoy life and pursue excellence in our activities, but rather that all those accomplishments are undertaken in the light of eternity. If we aren’t building treasure in Heaven, all our treasure on earth will rust.
Tulips too
Applying that outlook to the arts and sciences, vanitas paintings often include books, maps, and musical instruments. In reference to wealth there might be purses, jewelry, and gold objects. Earthly pleasure is symbolized by goblets, pipes, dice, and playing cards. More overt symbols of death include skulls, over-ripened fruit, fading flowers, clocks, and burning candles.
One currently-working artist, Carlo Russo, explains why he chose to include a tulip in his vanitas; “The tulip was considered a sign of great wealth, like the finest jewelry. This specimen is called a Zomershoon and dates to 1620s Holland ... It’s the last known existing line of tulips that dates back to the Dutch Golden Age.”
For him, the tulip represents a link to antiquity, and even as cut flowers fade quickly in their vases, we can intuit some mysterious link from generation to generation, a life that flows through time in an unbroken thread.
Funny enough, some vanitas paintings became opportunities for artists to display their skill at painting glass and metalwork. The artists wanted to show off a little bit and demonstrate their technical skill at achieving real-life effects; the way a flower stem seems to bend when it refracts through the water in a vase, how silver at high polish reflects complicated images, the way broken glass catches the light at odd angles. It’s ironic – a fact I’m sure the artists well understood – that the painting itself could become a display of vanity. We can’t take our wealth to Heaven, neither can we take our favorite paintings.
So, if everything is vanity, then what’s the point of life?
I think the answer can only be in the love we share, the relationships we make, and the prayers we offer. Everything else – the flowers, achievements, pleasures – are but a reflection of the true treasure we build up when we give ourselves away for the sake of loving God and each other. It’s a strange truth that, when we give something away, God eventually restores it to us. But if we hold on too tight, everything we hold dear slips away.
This is the hidden secret of the vanitas, that there is beauty even in our passing away. Our departure is but the entrance into a reality more beautiful.
Today, on All Souls Day, it’s a particularly fitting time to contemplate death, to consider the vanity to which we so often succumb. We acknowledge that we are pilgrims in this world, that we and those we love eventually die. When we look directly at death without flinching, knowing that Christ has already died for us, death loses its sting. Not that it isn’t an immensely daunting event, or that it hurts any less to pray today for those we love who aren’t here anymore, but beauty is hidden just around the corner, just through the door, and the darkness is but the eclipsed Cross just before sunrise.
