Reflecting on our own mortality. It’s a spiritual practice with deep roots in the Christian faith.

Every year on “Ash Wednesday” believers all over globe get ashes smeared on their heads with the solemn reminder:

“Remember that you are dust. And to dust you shall return.”

One of the most amazing and bizarre places I’ve been is the Sedlec Ossuary - a Church of bones outside of Prague in the Czech Republic. The church contains the bones from somewhere between 40 and 70 thousand human skeletons. The reasoning for the church to collect the bones was simple enough. A monk threw some sand from the Holy Land around the church sometime in the 1300s. Holy Land dirt made it became a popular place for Central European nobility to be buried. The church ran out of room for burying people, so monks started exhuming old graves and turning bones into chandeliers.

Sure. It’s macabre. But death is actually quite a normal occurrence.

Death is death.

It’s inevitable.
It’s ubiquitous.
It’s universal.

And it’s good to have that reminder. I guess it’s why death and grief is such a theme in so much art, film, music, and literature. The horror genre is incredibly popular. Not because it’s cool to be gross. It’s popular because it reminds us that we’re only here for a time.

My son, daughter-in-law, and some friends are heading to the old city of Charleston this weekend. We told them that one of the best things we did was to wander through the city’s old cemeteries. There is something about graveyards that connect us to the place. The people. The history. Those who have come before us.

And knowing that we, too, will someday be a part of the history of a place or people.

So it’s proper and healthy to frequently reflect on the brevity of life. It’s not morbid.

It’s good to remember that we’re only here for a short time. What will we do with the time that we have?