Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, the nun behind the ever-growing memento mori phenomenon, interviewed for the Verbum blog:
Sister, you came back to the Church after becoming an atheist as a teenager. What led you back to the Church and to your vocation with the Daughters of Saint Paul?
I first doubted whether God really existed at the age of five. My natural skepticism, coupled with the problem of suffering, led me to turn to atheism at the age of fourteen. I was a materialist atheist for over a decade. Eventually, I began to realize that my worldview had unsatisfying answers to some of life’s most important questions. So, I began to explore different religions and worldviews. I still didn’t believe in God, but I was investigating, searching for truth. Then, in one Damascus-like moment in Costa Rica, I had what Jacques Maritain would call “a metaphysical experience” in which God made clear to me that he existed, that he was a person, that he loved me, and that he had a plan for my life. I would have never imagined it as an atheist, but my experience of God in that moment eventually led me back to the Church and later into the convent.
And:
Sister, you’ve written two books on the theme of Memento Mori. Can you tell us how these projects came about?
I was inspired by the founder of my religious order, Blessed James Alberione— who kept a skull on his desk to remember his inevitable death—to begin meditating every day on my death. Over two years ago, I also got a skull for my desk and started to meditate on death every day. I shared my journey on Twitter, and before I knew it, thousands of other people were getting excited about memento mori and meditating on their death. People were buying skulls for their desks and reading my tweets, but I wanted to help people really integrate this practice into their lives. So that’s where the idea for my memento mori projects came from. I worked with my sisters at the Daughters of Saint Paul to create a memento mori journal, a Lenten devotional, and an upcoming prayer book, Memento Mori: Prayers on the Last Things. It’s been exciting to see peoples’ responses to these projects because I know that the Holy Spirit is using them to help people to grow in the spiritual life. The practice of remembering death and living for heaven is so vitally important in the Christian life.
Good interview. Sister Noble’s work really speaks to people steeped in the current atheistic and aggressively secular cultural zeitgeist because, quite simply, she embraced it herself growing up, as she explains.
“Beginning with the end in mind”, as Stephen Covey so famously championed in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is a great strategy not just for work, but for all of life, especially one’s spiritual life. Meditating on one’s death, far from being a distasteful exercise, is actually a great, practical starting point for gaining wisdom on how to live well in the present. “So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12, RSV).