The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 2

This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.

The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:6-8: "Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord."

The featured quote for this episode is from Marcus Aurelius. He said, "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 2" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.

--- The Christian Art of Dying

Since the beginning of the church Christians have cared for the dying and sought to practice their deaths in ways that express belief in Christ's death and his resurrection. These practices sought to honor the body as the image of God. If God became a human, and even he had to die, Christians recognized that to die is not something to fight against, though it was not a part of God's original design. And if Christ was raised from death, Christians believe that death does not hold any power over the faithful.

Donne was immersed in a culture that prepared even its children to die well, expressing these Christian values and beliefs. Medieval Christians contemplated their own deaths early and often. Disease struck the young and old without warning. "Life, men thought then, was a preparation for death, and it behooved each one to be ready to meet it," writes one of Donne's biographers. "The surest way to meet such a moment was to have been through it often in the mind, to have endured it all in anticipation, and so to be able to meet it with the confidence becoming a Christian who trusted in the saving grace of Christ's sacrifice."

This mental preparation resulted in the ars moriendi; the art of dying. Christians in the second half of the fifteenth century endured their deaths in anticipation of the resurrection with the help of illustrated woodcuts. At that time the plague raged through Europe, and Christians could no longer count on the support of others at the end of their lives. Priests typically cared for the dying, administering the last rites, but during the plague, writes historian Arthur Imhof, "many people died at the same time, and there were not enough priests to assist everyone." These widely circulated woodcuts provided a way to minister to people who were alone.

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