The True Temple of Equality

I grew up with constant reminders of how unique I was. No one else had my fingerprints. No one else had my particular blend of experiences, talents, and passions. The self-help industry has made billions confirming this. LinkedIn exists almost entirely to prove it. We have built an entire civilization around the premise that the goal of a human life is to become singular, irreplaceable, and if possible, monetizable.

The catacombs of Paris have a different opinion.

We recently had the opportunity to take our oldest kids to Europe. It was the first time they had been out of the country. We flew into Amsterdam and then worked our way through Brussels, Paris, and ultimately London. That's obviously an ambitious agenda, and we could only scratch the surface of the incredible cities we were in. But one experience in particular continues to stick with me.

In Paris, we bought tickets to tour the underground catacombs. The catacombs were originally a solution to the lack of adequate space for the burial of the dead in Paris over centuries. They devised a strategy to move the bones underground and stack them together along tunnel after tunnel that had been mined for stone. Today they've turned this into a thoughtful tour experience that combines both history and location.

It didn't feel as ominous as I expected. Instead, there was a strange beauty to it. Especially when you try to wrap your head around the fact that there are six million people represented down there.

One of the signs said, "All are equal in death." As I stared at the bones stacked neatly together in row after row, it became overwhelmingly apparent how true that statement was. We spend so much of our time trying to be remarkable, trying to separate ourselves from others, fearing that somehow we haven't done enough.

And yet you could stack my bones on top of these other bones and you'd hardly tell the difference. Our humanity is shared in the most literal sense of our bodies. As one sign read,

The Catacombs house the remains of millions of anonymous people, whose bones are mixed together. Few of them can be identified, but the archives of the evacuated cemeteries testify to the presence of the French personalities whose illustrious names have lived on through the centuries, such as scientists, writers, ministers, politically committed figures, etc.

In 1809, a visitor of the Catacombs wrote a rather enlightening comment on the postrevolutionary spirit of the age: "I have visited the true temple of equality."

Reflecting on this experience at the same time the world saw its first trillionaire makes me realize how much we obscure the truth of our existence. In life, we may imagine that our success and accomplishments set us apart from others forever. We can lock ourselves into a perpetual cycle of accumulation, aiming to die with large bank accounts as grave markers of our worth.

It reminds me of a Charles Dickens line from Great Expectations: "Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day." Dickens was a master at showing how the people we think of as successful are the ones most in need of pity. We can only imagine what he'd say about a trillionaire (or how many ghosts that would take to fix).

It's especially sad to me how many people look up to the world's first trillionaire as an example of success rather than a marker of a broken system. To quote the poet Alex Dawson,

There's a man on Earth who thinks he
owns the land and sky, but if the universe

emptied out her pockets, a billion, trillion
stars would fall out, and he'd still be

trying to find God in the face of a small,
shiny coin.

But God's face is not found in a shiny coin. That's Caesar's face. That's why Jesus invites us to “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Matthew 22:21).

God's face is found in the people around you, especially in those who struggle under the weight of a system that allows for trillionaires to be made and celebrated. The catacombs level everyone down, but Jesus elevates everyone from the bottom. Both realities help us see our humanity with more honesty.

God's face is found in millions of anonymous people, whose bones will one day be mixed together.

If this resonated, there's more where it came from. The Rebuilding Faith community is where I do this work every week alongside people rebuilding their faith on the outside of institutional Christianity — book studies, live calls, weekly newsletter, and honest conversation. Find out more.

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