![\"damick-gravestone\"](\"\/asd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2014\/10\/damick-gravestone.jpg\")
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S<\/span>eeing my father’s name on this stone next to my recently departed mother’s reminds me that I used to be horrified at the morbid idea of having a tombstone with the name of a living person on it. It just didn’t seem right to be reminded of one’s death so baldly, literally to set up a monument to a future loss of life.<\/p>\n But especially as I’ve had a lot more experience with death as a pastor and with attempting to live the spiritual life, I not only think it’s not horrifying but is rather entirely appropriate. It’s not just that we may as well get a tombstone engraved when we’re getting other work on it done. It’s that this is where we all shall someday be—our bodies in the earth, our souls temporarily separated from them, awaiting the universal resurrection.<\/p>\n And this is not fatalism but should rather serve as a reminder for us that our lives are aimed through death at the resurrection. Shall we not die to this world so that we may live to Christ?<\/p>\n The remembrance of death is a theme in Orthodox spiritual tradition. It is a simple thing, really—remember that you will someday die. I’ve heard that there is even a Romanian monastic custom of greeting with “Brother, have you thought about death today?” One of the ways clergy remind ourselves to remember death is that we ordinarily dress in black. People sometimes ask me why I wear black, and I say, “Because I’m dead.” Dead to the world, of course. Or, at least, I’m trying to be.<\/p>\n Why should we remember death? It is not only because we will all face it, and so such remembrance is realistic. It is also because this life is a preparation for death, a long training for that passage through death not into life after death, but ultimately into life after life after death—the universal resurrection.<\/p>\n Am I prepared for death? Lots of people don’t even have their wills and life insurance lined up for the moment when their souls temporarily slip from their bodies, but I think even fewer have been working on how to make the spiritual transition in good shape.<\/p>\n Remembering that it will happen is a good start. And it’s probably good to remember every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"