It isn’t only old people who talk about the past, but it certainly is old people (like me). Memory is in fact one of the greatest gifts of life, to be able to call to mind the events, places, relationships that have populated our lives.
Just now, remembering is a significant part of my life, as we gather for a ‘celebration of life’, for one of my brothers who died this week. The old idea of a funeral is being replaced by a ‘memorial service’ or a ‘celebration of life’. They both focus on remembering and being thankful.
In the main, this shift is positive and helpful, but the key thing is what we do with these memories. Certainly we want to honour a life that has now ended. But we need also to take the opportunity to learn from that life experience. Memory is given to us for this positive enabling purpose.
In my book on the life of Mervyn Himbury (Mervyn Himbury: Principal and Preacher), I drew from a sermon he once preached on memory, quoting a saying of Søren Kierkegaard, itself based on a prayer of St Teresa of Avila: ‘Lord, help us to remember what we ought not to forget, and to forget what we ought not to remember’.
Some remembering is not helpful, and St Teresa’s idea was that we need the wisdom to know which memories to let go and we need actually to do so. That is much harder to do than to say!
Positively, there are many times when our remembering gives joy, humour, maybe a sense of satisfaction. Photos from our past bring back memories, even surprises. Did I actually wear a shirt like that? Surely not! And as we remember the 1960s and 70s: so much hair!
Remembering offers us many things. In the Christian tradition, as also the Hebrew tradition, remembering is central to our worship events. Ash Wednesday: ‘Remember that you are dust.’ At the Communion or Eucharist, we quote the story of the ‘Last Supper’ and Jesus’ saying, ‘Do this, remembering me’.
This remembering has been the subject of scholarship ever since that time, and crucially it draws upon the Jewish practice of calling to mind the ‘Exodus’, at the Shabbat. Here the story is recited of the ancient people’s escape from slavery in Egypt, and it is not told about other people, it uses the word ‘we’. We were slaves in Egypt … and God brought us out of that situation. This memory is inclusive. To recount it is to be gathered into it. This remembering makes those who tell the story today participants in what it is about.
One way of understanding this is to hyphenate the word: re-member. The idea has a sense of what we receive and are drawn into, through the shared memories. It’s not so much something we claim for ourselves as something the story and remembering give to us. We become (again) parts of a community which tells these stories and shares this tradition.
I like the idea that this is traditioning. We participate in a living story, which is our tradition. It lives not only in the past. It is present and we are present to it, along with others who share the story.
To participate in it is to be re-membered, and with that remembering we share meanings, hopes, and responsibilities.
To enable these things, we need forms or rituals, and leaders—not necessarily in any ‘official’ role, but still those who guide and enable our remembering. We carry these memories, of value to ourselves and to pass them on to those who come after us, even while they may not see any value in them.
In so many ways, this remembering and re-membering is a habit of life. We are I think in danger of losing so much of what this means for us, yet at times like the passing of someone we love we sense the need for it.
This is a habit, to live in and wear, day by day and year by year, this remembering. It is not living in the past, but the past living in us.
What do you think, dear reader?
What are your experiences of such re-membering? I would love to know.