My little boy says something these days with the funny incongruity indicative of children learning their language for the first time:
“Mommy, you have dry bones.”
He says this as he points to my arm or my leg, repeats it when he examines his own feet or hands with the focused attention of an archeologist at a dig site.
“Dry bones, Mommy. Dry bones.”
“Yes,” I reply. “We all have bones in our body.” I explain to him what bones are, how they work, gently squeeze each finger and toe to make my point that we’re framed and supported by structures of calcium and collagen. He points to his head, looks up at me with impossible blue eyes. “Yes,” I agree again, instinctively knowing his question. “Even your skull is made up of bones. But they’re not really dry inside our bodies,” I add as my own afterthought.
It’s an unimportant point because he’s not entirely wrong. Our bones may not exactly be dry while they’re encased in fascia and flesh, but they will be someday when they’ve met whatever fate awaits us.
Every time I think about this, Pattiann Rogers’s “Nearing Autobiography” immediately drifts into my headspace:
Those are my bones rifted
and curled, knees to chin
among the rocks on the beach,
my hands splayed beneath my skull
in the mud. Those are my rib
bones resting like white sticks
wracked on the bank, laid down,
delivered, rubbed clean
by river and snow …
In this poem, the bones of others - and otherness, including the very elements of creation - are also our bones. The story of nature and our story in it is so intimately intertwined that they cannot be separated, yet the speaker recognizes her bones everywhere: “I recognize them, no others’ / patterned and wrought,” Rogers goes on. “Everything I assemble, all / the constructions I have rendered / are the metal and dust of my locked / and storied bones.”
But I digress.
Although I don’t remember singing it with him, the old spiritual, “Dem Bones,” has become the background melody for conversations with my son about our body bones, as well as the many bones around our home.
The bleached skull of a wild boar, for example, its razor-sharp tusks still protruding from his lower jaw, sits on my writing desk. In our dining room, the skulls of cows - one still with horns and wrapped in brown twine - watch over my grandmother’s piano. The skull of a small buck, his antlers proudly proclaiming his age (or perhaps, lack thereof) hangs over the step into our kitchen. And even in the backyard, the skull of a mule deer, grayed and chipped from the squirrels’ chewing, overlooks a flower bed.
It might seem macabre, but these bones are as much to me about momento mori as they are about place and decorative beauty: this deer, and cow, and boar once roamed through sagebrush and cacti, drank from wild creeks, noticed, maybe, the moon shining like Rogers’s “bald cranium” until they fell in a field or ditch and someone picked them up, months or years later, and eventually brought them to me as a gift.
Neck bone connected to the head bone … the song reverberates.
You cannot, in other words, take yourself too seriously when you stare into the empty eye sockets of a boar while drinking your morning coffee.
Hear the word of the Lord.
“Dem Bones” is almost synonymous with children’s Sunday school today, and we recognize this version the most, recorded by the Delta Rhythm Boys in 1950. However, the story of “Dem Bones” actually has a profound history. It was written by James Weldon Johnson, a prolific poet, civil rights activist, and diplomat (among many other things) who worked tirelessly until his death for Black equal rights (read a more comprehensive biography here). He was also a successful novelist, memoirist, and songwriter. Co-written with his brother, “Dem Bones” was inspired by the fiery Southern sermons he heard at the time, including, perhaps “Dry Bones in the Valley,” an extremely popular and oft-circulated sermon written by the Rev. J.M. Gates in 1926.
In his sermon, the Rev. Gates compares Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones which is resurrected and lives again to the intense struggles and hopes of Black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. “You dry bones!” he cries out over and over again in his sermon. “Hear the word of the Lord!”
“Amen!” someone returns.
It is worth reading the passage from Ezekiel 37:1-14 in its entirety:
The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in midst of the valley; and it was full of bones … there were many in the valley; and indeed they were very dry. And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
So I answered, “O Lord, God, You know.”
Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them.
Also he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”’” So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet …
Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel … Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves … Then you shall know that I am the Lord … I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live …”’” (NKJV).
I can never read this passage in Ezekiel without getting chills.
The scene is full of complete and utter desolation: not just a small field, but an entire valley of dry bones sweeps before Ezekiel (other translations note a “plain”).
And not just the bones of the dead, but of the slain. Something or someone had cut, sliced, poisoned, murdered. A fullness of life existed in them before, but enough time - and enough stripping - reduced once-living bodies into nothing but unburied, undifferentiated, unknown bones.
It shines yellow-white now, but in order to make fit the boar’s head for any setting other than the field in which my father-in-law found it, the skull had to be soaked in a solution of hydrogen peroxide for several days. The weak acids slowly dissolved off the last bits of skin and fuzz, most of which had already long been worn away by the elements. What remained was smooth, butter-colored bone, but absolutely nothing resembling life.
In Orthodox Christianity, we do not take the valley of the dry bones lightly. To see the dry bones is to recognize not just death, but the complete decimation of life, to witness and experience utter exclusion from the presence of God. Death was never supposed to be, and what slays in the valley of dry bones is our sin, our willful disobedience that creates distance from God. For the Orthodox Christian, that distance from God and all its mechinations, distortions, consequences is the definition of death itself, for there is no life apart from God (1 John 5:11).
“I called to mind the Prophet who shouted, ‘I am but earth and ash,’” wrote St. John of Damascus in one stanza of the “Evlogetaria for the Dead,” which is sung in every funeral service of the Orthodox Church. An evlogetaria is a special troparia, or series of hymns, separated by a refrain, oftentimes “Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me thy statues” (Psalms 118/119:12). There are two types of evlogetaria in the Orthodox Church - a resurrectional and a funereal - and it is this funereal one that is full of lamentations on death.
This stanza continues:
And once again I looked with attention to the tombs, and I saw the bones therein which of flesh were naked; and I said, “Which indeed is he that is king? Or which is soldier? Which is the wealthy, which the needy?”
And then:
“Which the righteous, or which the sinner?”
But to Your servant, O Lord, grant that with the righteous he (she) may repose.
The speaker, peering into the tombs, realizes he cannot discern who was wealthy or poor, who was king or soldier, who was righteous or sinner based on the bones alone. The bones, stripped of their flesh and workings, leave no clue. Everyone in death looks the same, as all eventually become “dust and ashes” (Genesis 18:27, NKJV). Only the life lived in Christ differentiates the righteous from the sinner, and we pray for the person at every Orthodox funeral (and for at least 40 days afterwards) that it was the former.
We lament death - this utter destruction and desolation of the sacred created and our relationship to God - over and over again. Another stanza from the funeral service reads:
Weep, and with tears lament when with understanding I think on death, and see how in the graves there sleeps the beauty which once for us was fashioned in the image of God, but now is shapeless, ignoble, and bare of all the graces. O how strange a thing; what is this mystery which concerns us humans? Why were we given up to decay? And why to death united in wedlock?
Truly, as it is written, these things come to pass by ordinance of God, Who to him (her), now gone gives rest.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
Here we embrace the confounding question of why death happens at all and how it strips us of what we were meant to be, “the beauty which once for us was fashioned in the image of God,” but somehow turned us, in death (and in sin), into something “shapeless, ignoble, and bare of all the graces.” How indeed strange (and cruel, and unfair, and heartbreaking) a thing, something it is right for us to ponder and ask of our God. (For an absolutely beautiful and haunting recording of the Orthodox funeral service, check out Fr. Apostolos Hill’s Hymns of Paradise, an album we regularly have on repeat. It is another type of momento mori for me.)
But yet, there is hope, and this is referenced, too, just one line later:
The death which You have endured, O Lord, is become the harbinger of deathlessness; if You had not been laid in Your tomb, then would not the gates of Paradise have been opened; wherefore to him (her), now gone from us give rest, for You are the Friend of Mankind.
Ezekiel’s vision, of course, is a prophecy about the dry bones rising again and Who will do it.
This was no scene from Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness with its leggy, animated skeletons awkwardly marching forward in a rage. The dry bones of the valley were knit together again with muscle and tendons, skin and sinew, in a moment of thundering quaking and realization of Who did it.
For it wasn’t until “the Spirit entered into them” - when they had the breath of Life that could only come from God - that they became fully human. And it wasn’t until they recognized Who gave them that breath that they became fully living.
For Christians, this prophesies the Final Resurrection in which the Creator vivifies “our dead bodies, and promising resurrection to them, and resuscitation from their sepulchers and tombs … as Himself the good Father, benevolently conferring life upon those who have not life from themselves,” as St. Irenaeus wrote.1 For Christians, Ezekiel’s vision is about the physical restoration and relationship to those who believed, promised to God’s beloved through the coming of Christ, for “you shall know that I am the Lord.”
Its point is so important that the passage is read at the Matins service of Great and Holy Saturday - the dark day after Christ’s brutal crucifixion during which we wait and mourn and anticipate His great and glorious Resurrection on Pascha.
Ezekiel’s vision is universal to all who hope and believe in God, following the path He set before us with Christ, through whatever valleys we travel. “Can these dry bones live again?” he is asked. How is it possible when they have been dead so long, to the point of becoming dust when crushed beneath a heel?
The horns on my cow’s skull have grown brittle over the years. The teeth from another are loose, and already two or three have long been lost to the dust of history. These skulls will be forgotten someday. My own bones, if I am lucky, will be swallowed up by the earth in this same country the cow, and the deer, and the boar once roamed.
By what power could I ever imagine the dry bones of these plains, or these graves, or Ezekiel’s vision from the 6th century BC resurrected and enlivened again?
And by what power did others, “stooping down and looking in” at another tomb, find not a body with bones the women desired to annoint with spices, but only linen cloths and angels (John 20:6-8, 11)?
“O Lord, God, You know.”
And we do indeed know.
For “I have been crucified with Christ,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20, NKJV).
Hear the word of the Lord.
***
The Orthodox Study Bible. (Elk Grove, CA: St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology, 2008), p. 1219.