Eternity in the Human Heart

Back in January, I drove up to Cleveland for a day to visit the Mummies of the World exhibit. I’d been excited about it for months and got a ticket for Christmas. I love this sort of thing. I wandered slowly through and read all the signs.

I saw naturally preserved mummies from 17th century Germany, wearing knitted stockings, with stitches that are exactly like knitted stockings today.

Shrunken heads that are unbelievably small.

Ancient Egyptian mummies, and a recreation that was done in the 90s with a body that had been donated to science.

Mummies from South America, tightly wrapped in braided grass, braiding just like I do on my hair.

Bodies preserved for students studying anatomy in the 1800s.

It was so cool, and I would have happily looked at three times as many mummies.

When I finished, I had some time to kill before getting dinner, and I found I was within walking distance of the Cleveland Library, so I headed over, planning to write or read for a while. Once there, I remembered that they currently have a display a friend and I had been wanting to see (we haven’t been there together yet, but we’re planning to go later this week, which made me think about it again). The display is a room full of dried flowers, and I’d seen beautiful pictures of it, but they did not do it justice.

Thousands of flowers are threaded onto strings that hang from wooden beams. They are colorful in a muted way, and somehow appear sturdy and intact, yet like the wrong breath could make them fall to dust. They sway with the shifting air as admirerers walk the open paths through and around them. The sign at the door asks you not to touch, quite reasonably, but the delicate beauty makes it difficult to refrain. And no picture could ever convey the wonderful scent as you walk in.

I didn’t write or read. I sat and looked. And I pondered the experience of going from an exhibit of preserved dead human bodies to one of preserved dead flowers.

Both are fascinating and beautiful, in their own ways, but not quite right, not quite like they were in life. And one thing that makes them fascinating is that they are unusual; this isn’t what normally happens when something dies. Death brings decay.

I think humans have an inherent sense that death is wrong, that life ends, but that isn’t the way it should be. In general, we fight so hard to prevent it, and even, in some cases, to preserve what’s left afterwards, whether of a person or a flower.

And we’re right: life ending is not the way it should be. Death is an enemy, and it’s the last one God will destroy. Isn’t it intriguing to see how people of all times and cultures have had a sense of this, however faint?

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. – Ecclesiastes 3:11