Memory

  The persistence of memory by Dali

Yesterday I wrote about the sursum corda, the invocation recited at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer as we open our hearts to give thanks to God. Another essential aspect of the Prayer is the “anamnesis” which while not a word commonly used or known, is a word which carries crucial importance. The anamnesis is the part of the Prayer which invokes memory, specifically of salvation history. 

Yesterday was also Memorial Day and it occurred to me to spend not only time in prayer but time in anamnesic prayer. When we memorialize someone we remember them and all they have done. Memorial Day is at least a day to remember all who have given their lives for our country but more broadly it is for all who have given their lives for something greater, something which represents liberty and freedom for all.

Somehow on Memorial Day this year the space between secular and spiritual became very thin. Somehow in remembering those who have died for our country we were filled with grief and emotion for those who were lost to COVID19 and then there seemed to be no definitive moment that prayer morphed and became about God and all God did and does to assure our freedom. Memory of sacrifice is real and present in the past, today, as well as on Golgotha. 

I often use the piece on Memory which is below and written by David Whyte at funerals, even just a line or two. Yesterday and even today its entirety is resonating in my soul. It is indeed the consolation it was intended to be. 

You also may find a line which finds a home in you, a word or phrase which consoles. Today, mine is “Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.”

Anamnesis in its fullest sense is indeed keeping my prayer life grounded in the love and mercy of the God who has created all memory and who offers us the Spirit of Memory in its full holiness. This kind of memory is not capable of secular characterization nor chronological fixation. This kind of memory sustains. This memory is the source of our life.

MEMORY

is not just a then, recalled in a now, the past is never just the past, memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a wave form, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. But the guru’s simplistic urge to live only in the now misunderstands the multilayered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels. Whether it be the epochal moment initiated by the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe or a first glimpse of adulthood perceived in adolescence, memory passes through an individual human life like a building musical waveform, constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it, according to the way we inhabit our identities in the untouchable now.

Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

The genius of human memory is firstly its very creation through experience, and then the way it is laid down in the mind according to the identity we inhabited when we first decided to remember, then its outward radiating effect and then all its possible future outcomes, occurring all at the same time. We actually inhabit memory as a living threshold, as a place of choice and volition and imagination, a crossroads where our future diverges according to how we interpret, or perhaps more accurately, how we live the story we have inherited. We can be overwhelmed, traumatized, made smaller by the tide that brought us here, we can even be drowned and disappeared by memory; or we can spin a cocoon of insulation to protect ourselves and bob along passively in the wake of what we think has occurred, but we also have other more engaging possibilities; memory in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings.

A full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious, a living connection between what has been, what is and what is about to be. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.

Through the gift of an inheritance truly inhabited, we come to understand that memory creates and influences what is about to happen, and has little to do with what we quaintly and often unimaginatively call the past. We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses, meaning that all of her nine imaginative daughters, all of the nine forms of human creative endeavor recognized by the ancient Greek imagination, and longed for by individuals and societies to this day, were born from the womb and the body of memory.

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‘MEMORY’ from 

CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment 

and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. 

© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press