When Howard Carter and his associates found the tomb of King Tutankhamen, they opened up his casket and found another within it. They opened up the second, which was covered with gold leaf, and found a third. Inside the third casket was a fourth made of pure gold. The pharaoh’s body was in the fourth, wrapped in gold cloth with a gold face mask. But when the body was unwrapped, it was leathery and shriveled.

Whether we are trying to cloak a dead spiritual life, or something else, in caskets of gold to impress others, or maybe to impress those in the afterlife, the beauty of the exterior does not change the absence of life on the interior.