By Elizabeth Prata
Growing up, I lived next to a large, historic cemetery. I’ve always had a penchant for quietude, and the cemetery was relaxing and quiet. I used to ride my bike up and down the orderly rows, read Nancy Drew under a tree, and occasionally wander among the tombstones and read them. My young mind didn’t really make a connection between death of these people under the ground and my own death someday.
My family owned a string of funeral homes, but of course I was never allowed in the embalming room and I never saw a dead body. I did used to play in the casket room. Those ‘boxes’ were lined with pretty satin and had cute satin pillows in them. But still, those shiny satin lined mahogany boxes and death were not a connection point to me.
It wasn’t till Pompeii came to Boston that I stared death in the face…and knew death would come for me one day.
In the early 1970s some high schools still offered a classical education. In my Junior and Senior years I took electives such as Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Latin. By my second year of Latin I was in my senior year of high school. It was then that the huge discovery at Pompeii was revealed to the world in the form of the traveling exhibition “Pompeii A.D. 79”.
Boston was only an hour from my school so field trips to that city were common. In 4th grade our class went to Plymouth to see the Mayflower. Boston afforded us Rhode Island students lots of cultural opportunities.
The exhibition “Pompeii A.D. 79” spent a year first in Boston in 1978, then Chicago and Dallas. The traveling exhibit included include wall paintings, mosaics, marble sculptures, pottery, glass, gold and silver jewelry, and something else, something that captured my imagination and brought home death to me like no other. The plaster casts of people and animals contorted in death by the sudden flood of gas and cinders that erupted from Vesuvius on Aug. 24, A.D. 79, as described by the NY Times.
The NYT review of the departing exhibition in Boston opened this way:
“Pompeii, A.D. 79” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts reinforces a belief common to nearly all of us: that one day Nature will cry “Enough!” and gobble us up. A sinister fascination attaches therefore to the Roman city of Pompeii, which was swallowed up entirely and without warning on a fine day in August nearly 2,000 years ago. Pompeii on the morning of that day was a combination of Scarsdale and Acapulco: a place where people lived very well in surroundings of sensational natural beauty. By nightfall on that same day it was dead and gone, buried beneath layer upon layer of ash, pumice and volcanic mud: and not until the 1730’s did people try to find out what was underneath.
I have to say, the New York Times back in the day sure could write well.
As an impressionable and naïve teenager, I looked at those plaster casts of the people who died in contorted positions, in agony, hugging one another or simply dead in the street alone…death stared me in the face. Slapped me silly and laughed in maniacal glee. Whispers of “you, too, someday!” echoed in my spirit.
This was the first time I really started to think about death as a personal thing. Not an abstract thing, not a dad’s business thing. Personal. Like, I may die. At the Pompeii exhibit I was looking at people where death had gobbled them up in an instant! Whoa! Woe!
This notion haunted me for another 25 years, but after a while as the shock of Pompeii wore off I suppressed it (in unrighteousness). It reared its head when a teaching colleague retired but then died quickly of cancer. I pondered the meaning of life. As an adult, other than that one colleague who had died, death was remote to me, so it was easy to suppress the concept.
It was also easy to suppress the logical next questions- what happens after we die? Where do we go? Why does every culture have a concept of the afterlife, if the afterlife is not real? Is there a God in charge of the afterlife? How does that work? Who does he let in and who gets left out? On what basis?
These I assure you are the questions roaming around in corners of my brain, springing into consciousness once in a while to startle and perplex and honestly, plague me. So it is with every unsaved person. Romans 1:18-19 says it, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.
If a culture does agree there is a god, they make them up. The NYTimes article further explains, in a way that is to this now saved person painful and sad:
They [Pompeiians] also had a great sense of home. Home for them was half in and half out of doors, and it was presided over by household gods of a frisky and convivial kind. Many of those gods are indeed personified in the Boston show as fun people: rakish little figures cast in bronze, they seem to be egging the householder on to enjoy himself while he still can. Even Jupiter at Pompeii was not so much a figure of awe as a convivial chairperson who made the evening seem all too short.
If you have to agree there is a god, make him foolish, make him human-like, above all, make him non-threatening! The Romans 1 verse clearly says the wrath of God abides on all of us who have not come to saving faith. Intuitively, we know this but we suppress it. To salve our conscience, we make gods we can live with.
In His mercy and grace, God delivered to me the faith that saves, knowledge of my sins and the wrath to come. The fact that “God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8).
Death WILL gobble me up someday. Not “Nature” with a capital letter, lol. Not “The Universe”. God himself who determines the number of our days, saved and unsaved, will call us to our final place. I am grateful the eternal question about death is finally resolved for me. I will go to Jesus and dwell with Him forever in joy. You can too, if you have repented of your sin and acknowledge Jesus as the Lord.
the-end-time.org 