I'm glad I hadn't read Martin Luther.
[W]e ourselves should find piety there, and meditate on death and on resurrection, and respect the Saints who are buried there.
Complaining that the people of Wittenberg treated the city cemetery much as Aaron and I did - a place to go and romp and play, a spot to wander in the quiet and celebrate the lives of those now interred there, Luther was writing out of a long line - Delumeau traces the theme, in a particularly pungent way, back to St. John Chrysostom - of Christian writers and thinkers for whom death was no refuge from care and woe.
One would have thought that, having developed a species of spiritual thought that heaped scorn on our mortal life and its trappings, at the very least this same strain of asceticism would see death as a rescue, a rope leading us away from the horrors and vanities of this world.
Alas, while having a familiarity with death and the morbid details of physical decay unknown today, combined with a faith that saw the possibility of God's grace granting us eternal rest in the Divine Presence might have brought some ounce of solace, the exact opposite is true. Dwelling upon the macabre details of putrefaction and decay was a way of preaching even more about the vanity of life. After all, both the fleeting joys and overweening concerns of this life end for all of us in the same fashion - we are, to be blunt, worm food.
And not just worm food. Our eternal souls know no rest, no sense of peace in the grace of God. God's justice, faced with our myriad sins that enjoy the momentary raptures of this earthly life, may be far more severe than we had thought, our eternal condition not quite as assured as we might think. To dwell upon death was not to consider a rapturous union where, as the writer of the Revelation of John said, God will be all in all. On the contrary, to meditate upon our final rest should instill a fear and introspection that drives us far from the pursuit of contingent happiness and in to the arms of pious penance for the many sins that may yet render us heirs to the kingdom of perdition.
How sad that for far too long, God's grace was swamped by the need for some to demand a spiritual discipline that could not see even death - surely the result of Original Sin - as something gracious, a part of the ongoing process of life, to be welcomed in its time, too. The kind of morbid, indeed macabre, fascination with the details of our physical decay, of the reality of the fleeting nature of life and its joys (as well as sorrows) knows nothing of the God of Jesus Christ, sad to say.
Lucky for me, Aaron and I both understood it, in our own way.
