Remember Me

The Semites of Bible times did not simply think truth - they experienced truth. As we have previously emphasized truth is as much encounter as it is propositions. This experiential perspective on reality explains, in part, why Judaism never really developed vast systems of thought.... To the Jew, the deed was always more important than the creed. (Marvin R. Wilson, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, 1989).

My mother is, and there is no other way to put it, growing more senile by the day. We don’t know the root cause, and in a way, that is not important. What is important is that we spend time with her now. She still knows who I am, and what I do, but otherwise, she is usually in the dark about the specifics. She knows that I am somewhere on the West Coast. She usually mistakenly believes that I am working in a parish setting. She may call me several times the same week, unaware of the conversations we just had, and will always ask when I am coming to visit next. When I tell her, she will always ask for the current month and day, to place my coming into some kind of relative time concept - ah, I will be there next year, next month, next week, two days from now, and so forth. Often, we will have the exact same conversation four or five times within a short span, before she tells me she loves me, and wants me to pray for the family. This process may repeat a few times a week. For her, there is very little memory of what really happened, only that I was there at one point.

It occurred to me that this is not so different from fifty-some years ago, before I could form long-term memories as a child. I don’t think I can place her in my memory before I was four or five years old, but I am aware that she was there. Even now, she has countless memories of me, encounters as a very young child firmly imprinted in her soul, that I can never and will never be able to recall. But it was as important for me that she was there, as it was for her the experience of how I bonded with her as mother and child. Who God is to us - this is as important a question, if not infinitely more so, as to who and what our mother is.

We may think of the old Jewish arguments in the New Testament as mere hair-splitting over tenets, but they were describing something very personal for them – a lived experience of the living God, of a God who broke into human history. As Our Lord intimates to Nicodemus in the Gospel of John, He was now making that relationship something even more personal and present (cf John 3).

St. John marvels at this, even from the prologues of his Gospel and his first letter. “I didn’t just speak about God – I spoke with God – I was there in person, and so was He!” This does not mean that the creed is forgotten in place of the deed, for our Lord tells us, in no uncertain terms that, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15), and then, when we do not have Him in person, that He will send us the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

The Jewish and early Christian idea of remembrance, or of memory goes even further. Each memory, each participation in a past event, is to make present and at the same time participate in the past in a true encounter. When Our Lord tells us to “do this in memory of Me,” He is not asking us to flip through a photo album, or simply tell stories of what He means to us. He is asking us to encounter Him – ever ancient and ever new, in the same Sacrament, in that same Last Supper and Passion that echoes through eternity as theWedding Feast of the Lamb.

God, in spite of being the Ancient of Days, invites us every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation (yes, not only Christmas and Easter) to come and visit specifically and in person. Too often, I think we have a transactional mindset that unless I “get” a measure of grace in the Sacrament, that somehow the Mass is not worth it. You may not always remember any specific Mass, but your Heavenly Father always remembers and is always looking to draw us into His cherished memory of us, of how He loves us even to the Cross, and to make that Sacrifice present in a way we can at least begin to grasp in the now. You were present to Him at the Last Supper and at Calvary, even though there’s no humanly possible way for you to remember something before you existed. He wants you present now, more than anything else, to make that love real for you in a lived encounter.

If you’ve been away, come. Why you were away is not as important as it is that you BE with Him now.

Novena-The IMMACULATE CONCEPTION-2024

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