Bones Are Funny Things

deniers

The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he led me out . . . and set me in the center of the broad valley. It was filled with bones. He made me walk among them in every direction. So many lay on the surface of the valley! How dry they were! (Ezekiel 37:1-2)

Bones are funny things. I don’t just mean the funny bone but rather our rapport with them. Bones have many different meanings.

Bones are associated with fear and danger: consider the skull and crossbones, the universal symbol of poison and of everything harmful. Those bleached bones represent a warning and also the endpoint for anyone who ingests a toxin.

Then there is the Jolly Roger, another skull and bones symbol far less jolly to those on the receiving end of the pirate visitation than for those on the giving side. They’re a reminder that the brigands proffer their services for the disposing of material wealth and, perhaps, of life itself.

A deeper meaning

Yet, bones can also be a source of curiosity and awe, even of reverence. A walk through any natural history museum with its collection of fossils, particularly those large specimens of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, transports our minds to the places and ages when those fantastic beasts roamed the planet.

A walk through a church, with its selection of relics, transports us rather to the place where the owners of the fragments are now. Seen in this light, bones are almost a piece of eternity within us, a natural reminder that even the greatest beings of this world pass away, and yet, something is left; something remains.

Perhaps our relationship is bones is complicated, because our relationships with death and with eternity are complicated as well.

Bones and death

The modern world, and modern anthropology in particular, prefers not to think of either death or eternity. Perhaps no one expresses this sentiment better than the famous English writer, G.K. Chesterton who, describing the discovery of a few, perhaps unrelated, bone fragments, explains how science brought the skeleton to life:

The effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of cranium. (The Everlasting Man, 46)

Lest one think this is a movement of the past, one has only to read the headline I recently received from National Geographic, with a stunning painting of a young girl from the Stone Age, with piercing eyes, narrow face, hair billowing in the wind, under the title: “Everything we know about this girl comes from a piece of Stone Age ‘chewing gum.’” Scientists used her saliva to examine her genome, but you wouldn’t have known, staring at that face, that she was really only a combination of nucleotides and remnants of chromosomes. As Ecclesiastes would say: “Nothing is new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Somehow, the death and eternity of which bones speak become less apparent when they are dressed up in flesh and in imagination. After all, in this way the skeleton comes to enjoy an eternity on this earth. Anthropologists and geneticists have become the world’s best plastic surgeons.

The Judeo-Christian worldview

Yet, the Christian way of seeing things is far different; even in the Old Testament, Moses carries Joseph’s bones out of Egypt during the Exodus, “for Joseph had made the Israelites take a solemn oath, saying, ‘God will surely take care of you, and you must bring my bones up with you from here’” (Exodus 13:19). Indeed, as he lay dying, Joseph extracted that promise from his brothers as he told them “God will surely take care of you and lead you up from this land to the land that he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Genesis 50:24).

Joseph didn’t want his bones to remain in the land of exile, but to be returned to the Promised Land, the foreshadowing of heaven. Those bones were a reminder of God’s fidelity, and that, beyond the miseries that would overtake them, there was a promised land waiting for the Israelites. Joseph wanted whatever was left of him to enter into the promise and to participate in the joy.

For the Christian, bones are a reminder of both the fleetingness of life and the duration of eternity. In iconography, often a skull and crossbones appear beneath the cross of Christ, representing Adam. There is a tradition that Adam was buried at Mount Calvary, and thus, as Christ hung on the Cross, His blood washed the bones of our first father, the one through whom sin and death entered the world.

Likewise, the bones of the saints remind us that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. . . .  They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace” (Wisdom 3:1-3). They are in the hand of God, and hence they can intercede for us. Mortal life passes, but even the dry bones speak to us of the eternity that lies beyond the visible world.

To highlight the vanity of the world, St. Alphonsus Liguori cites the words a man wrote on a skull: “To one who thinks, everything here below seems deserving of contempt.” The saints are often pictured with skulls in religious art; it is called a Memento mori (Latin for “Remember that you must die”). As one scholar was told by his friend, when asked about the mortality rate of his town, “The death rate is one a piece, and people are dying who have never died before.” In other words, death comes for everyone.

Yet, as Christians, death isn’t a thought that should frighten us. Rather, it is a constant call to conversion, to recall that, if we fear death, the problem isn’t with death, but with the way we live.

Signs of eternity

Those dry bones speak to us, beckoning us to think of eternity. Love, and particularly love for God, makes even the deadest of dead things come alive. In one of his letters, Blessed Carlo Gnocchi recounts what a fellow military chaplain witnessed one day. After the end of the First World War, the chaplain was sent to the Valley of Edera (in southern Switzerland) to supervise the gathering of the remains of fallen soldiers. The valley was littered with mangled remains, and a poor, elderly woman approached the group, and said, “I want to be here when you gather up the remains; maybe you’ll find my son!” She spent that day, and the next, silent and attentive, diligently observing every single skeleton that was recovered.

On the third day, she arrived in the valley even before the soldiers, and they followed the same routine: skeleton after skeleton. Around mid-day, the soldiers recovered a mangled, shattered skeleton, and the woman suddenly stood up and, pointing to the bones, joyfully shouted, “That’s my son!”

Out of respect, the chaplain calmly replied, “Yes, it could be your son,” since, certainly her son was somewhere in that mountain of skeletons. But the woman ignored him: she knelt down next to the bones, caressed them, and kissed the skull with so much the love and strength that even the soldiers cried. Leaving her aside, they continued their work. Just under the place where the skeleton lay, they uncovered a backpack, and inside they found letters, all of them addressed.

The address was that poor woman’s; it was her son.

The final call

Even the deadest of dead things speak to us and are filled with love, if we look at them with the right eyes. Even death is nothing more than God calling us back into the eternity where He dwells in unimaginable light. Indeed, it is with this hope that Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones ends:

He said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel! They are saying, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are cut off.” Therefore, prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD: Look! I am going to open your graves; I will make you come up out of your graves, my people, and bring you back to the land of Israel. You shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and make you come up out of them, my people! I will put my spirit in you that you may come to life, and I will settle you in your land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD. I have spoken; I will do it—oracle of the LORD. (Ezekiel 37:11-14)

__________

Blessed Carlo Gnocchi shares the letter in his book Andate e insegnate, Opere, Milan (1993), 55. Cited by Miguel Angel Fuentes, Educar los afectos (San Rafael: Ediciones del Verbo Encarnado, 2007), 236-237.

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4 thoughts on “Bones Are Funny Things”

  1. Your title pulled me in as I am currently dealing with a broken arm :-}…having fallen a week ago! While never easy, recovery at the age of 58 is particularly challenging. Your article was poignant to read as I am considering the fragility of my own self. Once again, I am learning that while we may be broken, we are not defeated and Christ Himself is our strength.

    1. I’m glad you found the article helpful, and sorry to hear about your arm! I’ll be praying for your prompt recovery, and for you to find your strength in Christ. He is our Rock!

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