Datur Omnibus Mori

I'm back from two weeks in Italy (Rome, Naples) and Malta. You can't visit these places without viewing numerous churches, basilicas, and cathedrals - and even co-cathedrals and pro-cathedrals (really).

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In most of the churches we visited, we walked all over dead people. They're buried under the floors, with their tombstones planted horizontally above them. In Malta, this practice is taken to an extreme, as you can see from the photo above. In Italy and Malta both, those who don't end up under the floor may end up somewhere in the walls, with a tombstone or 3-D marker on the spot.

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Many of these tombstones have depictions of skulls or the grim reaper. It's common to see "D.O.M." on them, which is an abbreviation for a Latin phrase. Depending which authority you consult, the phrase is "Deo Optimo Maximo" ("To God, Who's the Greatest and Best") or "Datur Omnibus Mori" ("It is Given to All to Die"). In this context, the second version fits best.

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The net effect of all this is that you can't go to church without being confronted with death. I find that salutary (pun intended). Every time you go to worship God with your fellow believers, you see grandpa in the floor and uncle in the wall and you're reminded that someday you'll join them.

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"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90.12). Each one of us will die soon - soon in terms of the span of recorded history, even sooner in comparison with the length of eternity. Yet how easily we forget that, especially in our teens and twenties, and think that, invulnerable, we will live forever.

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Even in our country, we used to lay out the dead in the parlors of our homes and then bury them in the cemeteries adjacent to our churches. Every Sunday, you'd see the dead as you came to praise the Immortal. We've gotten away from that. My church is raising millions of dollars right now for expansion, but there's no cemetery in the master plan. And I haven't heard any of my fellow elders suggest we should start burying expired church members in the floor of the auditorium. Maybe it would be good for us if we did.

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In Rome, some Capuchin monks took this message to heart. Five hundred years ago, they started preserving the bones of their deceased "monk brothers" and then began arranging them into various scenes, some rather whimsical. All told, there are now the bones of about 4,000 monks in this relatively small basement. Some would call it macabre. They would call it realistic: a sign posted there says, "What you are, we once were; what we are now, you one day will be."

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"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."