I recently read Carla Valentine’s fascinating account The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors.¹ Engagingly, wittily written and full of detail (for most readers this is probably not a good book to read while eating), I was entertained and informed.
This book unexpectedly connected to a conversation I’d had with a Christian friend. The friend had asked me to watch the Darren Wilson film Furious Love.² George Otis, Jr., founder and president of the Sentinel Group, “a Seattle-based Christian research, media, and training agency dedicated to helping revival-hungry communities discover the pathway to societal transformation,” speaks about demons in the film.³ To make his point about how real and dangerous demons are he brings up a Buddhist practice in which the practitioner visualizes the detailed dissection and decomposition of their body and offers their flesh in a feast for demons. This meditation practice is actually not intended to summon or feed demons. It is simply a vivid visual means of helping the practitioner internalize Buddhist principles.
The Chick and the Dead discusses similar thirteenth-century Buddhist meditations called the Cemetery Contemplations or Maranasati meditations. These meditations use art showing all the stages of human decomposition to assist in reflecting on death, impermanence, and transience. Carla Valentine connected this practice to medieval art called transis. Transis focus on humans in transition between death and complete decay. They were intended to help Christians cope with events like the plague and reflect on the Biblical teaching “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). Thus Christian practice historically has not been far removed from Buddhist practice, and in effect George Otis, Jr. was calling a Christian practice demonic.
Juicy irony.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Rated 5 teacups for a truly enjoyable nonfiction read from which I learned cool new facts. Read it yourself.
¹ Valentine, Carla. The chick and the dead: life and death behind mortuary doors. New York: St. Martins Press, 2017.
² Wilson, Darren. Furious Love. Accessed September 03, 2017. http://furiouslove.wpfilm.com/.
³ Otis, George, Jr. “George Otis, Jr.” Sentinel Group. Accessed September 03, 2017. http://www.sentinelgroup.org/gko-center.html.
Honeycomb's Hive 