O Man, Remember Who You Are

Remember?
I thought I would risk boring any readers that might exist out there with an extended reflection on a lecture I offered this week on ‘liturgical anamnesis’, which was itself inspired by the penetrating work of Jerome Hall.

It offered me an astounding variety of insights into the liturgy, memory and such.

I will post it in installments as I write up my lecture notes (which I spoke free form, so I need to write them out, now).

Just Do It
A preface: anamnesis, which means something like “remembrance”, is the Greek word used ((Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25) to render Jesus’ extraordinary interpolation of the Passover liturgical texts at the Last Supper: “This is my body…this the cup of my blood…do this in remembrance (ἀνάμνησιν) of me.” I say ‘render’ since we assume Jesus’ original words were in Aramaic or Hebrew, and not in Greek.

Exploring the Corners of My Mind
So what is this ‘memory’ all about? I set on an exploration, with Hall as my thinking companion, that was more than a mere Biblical exegesis of a few texts.

Vast amounts of ancient, medieval and modern ink have soaked into paper in service to exploring the question of memory, especially as it relates to growth in the Christian life. This is one of my favorite examples of such scholarship.

Ensouled Brains
Memory, in the human person, is a complex reality that reflects the complexity of our identity as embodied souls. The Christian tradition affirms that cognitive memory, like its sister faculties of intellect and will, is a spiritual (and so non-material) reality that reflects our being made in the divine image.

Setting aside the notoriously thorny problem of defining exactly what memory is, we can say here that cognitive memory is the unifying reservoir of all that we come to know. Memory synthesizes knowledge in a manner that constitutes our more-or-less unified sense of identity - who we are as individual persons. The awareness I have of being an I is rooted in memory's unifying power. Memory, therefore, is the ‘soul’ of personal identity. It is also the soul of our capacity to relate to others as a person, and so to love God, self and neighbor.

One need only think of a victim of Alzheimer to realize how devastating to identity and relationships the loss of memory is.

Narrative Memory
I also argued that the essential structuring form of our memory is ‘the story’ – our memory is essentially organized in narrative form.

We think of who we are within the context of story-sequences that unite disparate facts into a coherent, meaningful narratives that invest those fragmented facts with intelligible meaning. Our essential identity is structured around the many ‘stories’ we have taken in, formed and re-formed; and, if we are more-or-less unified persons, we have a central master-narrative of ‘who we are’ by which we judge all other alternate narratives.

If you think of your self as a ‘center of narrative gravity,’ your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative.

Of Blessed Memory
Blessed John Paul II understood this well, and in his book Memory and Identity, he challenged Europe, as it rushes into an ever-increasingly secularized identity, to return to its authentic and unifying memory which was profoundly shaped by the Judeo-Christian narrative. Both he and Pope Benedict have vigorously argued that the power that secularization is exerting globally is gradually - or not so gradually – erasing the memory of nations and cultures and replacing those memories with a new narrative that is suffused with Capitalist tropes like consumerism, materialism, and the postmodern marketplace ethic that Papa B16 famously identified as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’. {Important to note, though, that Benedict has argued secularism need not be so corrosive.}

So memory as identity must be understood not just on the level of individuals, but also on the level of groups - families, communities, nations.

But, in keeping with my fragmented style of thought, I digress.

Re-minding My Kids
This way of thinking of memory, identity and narrative impacts the way parents think of forming our children's identity.

Among the most powerful influences on children’s identity-construction are the stories we tell them; or the stories we allow to be told to them. Stories are ‘told’ to children in many ways, though the most powerful story-telling is the one they live day to day in our home, our church, our school. This is the ‘lived narrative’ that is life itself. This ever-unfolding, lived story is meant to give credence or give lie to the ‘other’ stories they hear/see in books and movies, songs and video games - stories told at the foot of the bed or the floor beneath the TV.

So many competing narratives filling their memories, seeking to shape their identities, especially those narratives that insert themselves into the imagination – movies, video games, TV shows, and especially music. How carefully we must shepherd them through this maize of narratives and insure that the primary stories we wish to form their identity stand out as the most powerful, most true, most compelling and most frequently featured in their exceptionally impressionable worlds.

Critical Toolbox
In addition, parents must labor hard to insure that children are given the age-appropriate tools to critically negotiate the marketplace of narratives out there. The temptation these days is simply to allow culture more or less unfiltered and unfettered access into our children’s minds, memories, imaginations, leaving a generation of young men and women shaped by fragmented or shattered narratives that give birth to their daughters, moral anxiety and spiritual depression.

But I, wholly fragmented along with my generation, digress still further; though you will see it is related to liturgical anamnesis – that great healer of memory, with the power to restore and reconstitute our memories in the unshakable memory of God and of God’s people.