The fragility of life

 

Last month I had the privilege of visiting Herculaneum. The archaeological site is smaller than Pompeii and more manageable. There was obvious wealth - a huge villa set on the edge of what would then have been the sea. This was the equivalent of Cornwall or the North Norfolk coast where wealthy Roman citizens could get out of Rome. In the local exhibition centre we saw beautiful jewellery, some of which was very similar to what we would see in our shops here. And down, where the beach was, in the place where the boats were kept, we saw the skeletons. They are of the people, young and old, free and slave, who fled to the shore as Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, hoping against hope to be rescued by sea. It is incredibly poignant, not least because at least two of the skulls have open jaws set in what appears to be an eternal scream as the scorching gas cloud enveloped them. We hope their death was pretty instantaneous.

It really brought home the fragility of life. Here were people living their everyday life. Some rich, some poor. Some good, others bad. Some religious, others irreligious. They were just like us. There may have been one or two followers of Jesus: the message of the Judaean carpenter would have reached Rome by this time. Indeed, the apostle Paul would almost certainly have been led through the streets of Pompeii on his way to imprisonment and execution in Rome. And suddenly, out of the blue, destruction and death rained down from the sky.

As Jesus was led away to be crucified, and as many wailed for him, he urges them not to weep for him but for themselves. He speaks of the terrible disaster that will happen to Jerusalem, not caused by a volcano, but by a devastating army. ‘Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘fall on us’, and to the mountains ‘cover us’.’

We live in uncertain times. We hear of terrible things that happen, of peoples who have suffered dreadfully from war in Gaza or Ukraine or the Sudan, when fire and death literally fall on them from the sky, or from natural disasters. In our global world the suffering of other places is brought into our living rooms. And yes, we can campaign or give enough to appease our consciences, but it is still very easy to think that it is them over there, and that this sort of thing will not happen here.

But as the people of Herculaneum discovered, life is incredibly fragile. We, despite our technology, are extraordinarily vulnerable. As Jesus reminded his listeners, ‘For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them away’. And yet we live as if we are eternal.

Please do not take this as an apocalyptic warning of imminent disaster befalling the Burnhams! It is simply a reflection, as Autumn has come and the evenings draw in, that whatever we believe, places like Herculaneum remind us that we need a little more humility in how we live, more gratitude that we do live in a place of relative peace and prosperity, greater awareness of the needs of others, and a consciousness that we are very fragile and we are not immortal. And as Mary says in the Magnificat, God does have a way ‘of scattering the proud in the imagination of their conceit’ and ‘of lifting up the humble’.