"Don’t forget, you’re going to die"
This month's reflection by Travis Helms:
As a lover of poetry and the humanities, I’ve always been a fairly late adopter of most things technological; but a year ago I discovered an app that has profoundly changed my relationship to time, and life in general. The app is called WeCroak, and five times a day, my phone buzzes and a little banner appears on my screen that displays the text: “don’t forget, you’re going to die. Open for a quote.” I tap, and there appears a few lines from writers like Rumi or Emily Dickinson reflecting on our mortality.
When I tell people about my passion for this app, they often look at me a little quizzically. “Isn’t that kind of morbid?” their raised eyebrows seem to say. But contemplating the fact of life’s — and my own — ultimate impermanence has had a liberating effect on me. What usually happens is, I read, I pause, then close my eyes. I pan out and try to take a high-altitude, God’s-eye view of my life in its entirety. What is most important to me? What do I want to experience from, and contribute to, (in the words of Mary Oliver) my “one wild and precious life”? Contemplating the arc of my life in its entirety helps reperspectivize things for me. All of a sudden the million minute dramas I find myself caught up in seem less critical, and have less of a hold on me. Am I really freaking out about getting to zero inbox? Am I really obsessing over the perfect sermon phrasing? Or can I let some of that stress go, and be more present to the beauty — and the pain — unfolding and cascading all around me?
As Lent approaches, this is the saving invitation I want to contemplate. “Don’t forget, you’re going to die” is essentially the message of Ash Wednesday: “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The ashes we impose aren’t meant to glumly plunge us into despondency; we hope they will instill in us a sense of wonder and of gratitude: we are here when we did not have to be; all of this is here — mountains and fields and rivers and food and music — when nothing could have been here in its place. Part of the message of Lent — and of the Gospel undergirding it — is that death is not the final word, and that “even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia” in the hope of resurrection. We look around and see the miracle of resurrection everywhere: seeds fall to the ground and die so that some new life might arise. And the same is true, at times, with our own lives. Death is a prelude to resurrection: to new growth and possibility around us and within us. The invitation is to embrace this fact.
“Don’t forget, we’re going to die.” And before we do, let’s not forget to truly live.
Love,
Travis
