Recollection and Hope

In Search of Lost Time:

Reflections on Memory and the First Christmas

from:http://www.mbird.com/2013/12/in-search-of-lost-time-reflections-on-memory-and-the-first-christmas/
by WILL MCDAVID 

Faulkner’s one vision of hope is “the recollection and the blood of the Lamb.” The implicit suggestion that the blood of the Lamb is experientially realized in recollection is a compelling one this time of year, the time the Church has designated for rememberance, recollection."

‘How does the past relate meaningfully to the present?’, Faulkner seems to be asking. And we all face Quentin’s problem in some way – the pure world of an old story of the birth of God, his obedience and suffering and death and resurrection, changes the world forever… and yet things are the same. Time stretches on, increasing every second the historical distance between Christ’s birth and our world, ‘red in tooth and claw’, and a Second Coming is continually deferred, pushed away, with only the recollective balm of written accounts, warm emotions, ritual gestures, and a liturgical calendar to ease the strain of time as it continually threatens to pull away from the stories which claim to give us meaning. All that to say, there is a gap between the events themselves and our memories of them, only mediated by words on a page or vague images. Just try to picture, with unaided memory, your child’s face at age five or the home in which you lived growing up – and those are experiences in which we have lived for days or years; appropriating events over two thousand years ago, of which we have no memory, is incomparably difficult.

The problem of relating meaningfully to the Christmas story is perhaps an honest approach to any celebration of the season at all. In his novel Swann’s Way – the opener to a series onRememberance of Things Past, more recently translated In Search of Lost Time, French writer Marcel Proust presents the problems of memory in a brilliant monologue by a narrator who tastes a sacrament of his past in a madeleine cookie dipped in tea:

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period of my past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up again out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say if it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be poured over without distress of mind.

This section is absolutely saturated with Eucharistic imagery. But Proust’s variation on the Christian Eucharist truthfully admits the idea that the sign may fail to point to its meaning; the link between symbol and symbolized, sacramentum and res, can unravel. “I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it” – this is almost a manifesto for a theology of the cross as it applies to memory. The form of death, resurrection, incarnation cannot be invited in memory; we resist placing ourselves in time, implicitly favoring, like Quentin and Proust’s narrator, an eternal present, “worries of to-day” and “hopes for to-morrow.” 

"Just showing up"

Hospitals stays are one of the few times in adulthood when we have an excuse to drop all the busywork that normally preoccupies us and go to be with the people we love. You simply spend time with them, without any social occasion for it–a wedding or anniversary, dinner or the theater. You just sit there in the same room, making small talk or reading, offering the dumb comfort of your presence. You are literally There for them. When you’re a kid, this is one of the dullest, most dehumanizing things you’re forced to do–being dressed up in a navy blazer or a sweater vest and dragged to a family reunions to be fawned over like a photo in an album, your physical presence all that’s required of you. But if you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone….

I probably don’t have to tell you that getting mad at your own mother for being old and sick does not make you feel like a model son or exemplary human being. Getting irritated at my own irritability did not improve matters. It made me only a little more forgiving of myself to understand that my anger was mostly fear.

I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, therby missing out on the very thing were so scared of losing. Sterne’s stairway [ed. note: a frustratingly large chunk of Shandy takes place in conversations that happen during a single descent of a staircase] is a perfect metaphor for all those tedious interstitial moments we can’t wait to get through that make up most of our lives; we don’t even think of stairways as places in themselves, only as a means to get somewhere else. I remember children’s stories about kids who were granted the power to effectively fast-forward their lives, skipping all the homework and chores to get right to the good parts–drivers’ license, girlfriend, being a grown-up. Inevitably, they ripped through their whole lives in no time and found themselves suddenly old, looking back on a blank, elided lifetime without even memories to show for it.

We’re all so eager, both in life and in art, to get past this bullshit to the next Good Part up ahead. Believe it or not, Sterne’s telling us, this bullshit is the good part. All those digressions were the story… With his tortuous nonplot he’s trying to tease us out of our insatiable impatience for narrative, our silly urgency to know What Next… He knows that all journeys, and all stories, have the same ending. . . 
. . .or do they?
 Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing

Only one kind of people

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.” Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing

"Nothing that is possible can save us"

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:21)

The poet W.H. Auden once wrote, “Nothing that is possible can save us/ We who must die demand a miracle”.

Home at last . . .

From aholyexperience.com

by Ann Voskamp

“Beat, Braveheart, beat on in the world. You will hurt and you will be held. Do not be afraid.“

“…no good thing does He withhold…” Ps. 84:11

And the good things in life are not health but holiness,
not the riches of this world but relationship with God,
not our plans but His presence —

and He withholds no good thing from us
because life’s good things aren’t ever things.

The "Happiness" sinkhole

Incurvatus in se

"Latin: Incurvatus in se" (Turned/curved inward on oneself) is a theological phrase describing a life lived "inward" for self rather than "outward" for God and others.

Paul the Apostle wrote of this condition in the Epistle to the Romans 7:15, 7:8-19

"As you might expect, the incurvatus in se of the human creature runs rampant, producing the twin offspring of entitlement and imperative (Thou Shalt Get Happy!), a combination which ironically doubles as a recipe for misery, it would appear. Lears’ other chief observation has to do with how these books, and perhaps the discipline itself, contain an over-reliance, and ultimately cruel insistence, on willpower as the primary/sole engine of wellbeing. If you don’t have enough, then you’re unfortunately out of luck."

Romans (The Message):

14-16 I can anticipate the response that is coming: “I know that all God’s commands are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary.
17-20 But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
21-23 It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
24 I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?
25 The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

The Solution Is Life on God’s Terms

8 1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

"I have come home at last."

"I have come home at last!" says a stunned unicorn at the end of "The Chronicles of Narnia." "This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now."

"HE works through gift"

FROM: http://liberate.org/2013/09/03/hear-me-andy/
by Kate Norris

"But “if/then” living will ultimately lead you to the same place with which every “winner” is familiar: dissatisfaction. You can never attain enough or earn enough. There is no earthly badge of honor that will satisfy a soul. It will always demand more.

It is not so with grace. When God unveiled his Son to the world he revealed that he works through gift. He always has, and he always will, until the final trumpet sounds. His gift is grace to a people whose earning and deserving has fallen off the axis of love. "

". . . even this I can not do for myself"

From: http://www.mbird.com
Flannery O'Connor:

“Prayer should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without an exegesis.” Confessing that her mind “is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery,” she asks for a faith motivated by love, not fear: “Give me the grace, dear God, to adore You, for even this I cannot do for myself.”…

She reckoned that her success would be the product of a holy collaboration: “If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.”

"Living your whole life on your knees"

 From: http://www.aholyexperience.com/   

 November 17, 2013 by Ann Voskamp

"Don’t ever forget it:

The real romantics are the boring ones — they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

Be one of the boring ones. Pray to be one who get 50 boring years of marriage – 50 years to let her heart bore a hole deep into yours.

Let everyone do their talking about 50 shades of grey, but don’t let anyone talk you out of it: committment is pretty much black and white. Because the truth is, real love will always make you suffer. Simply commit: Who am I willing to suffer for?

Who am I willing to take the reeking garbage out for and clean out the gross muck ponding at the bottom of the fridge? Who am I willing to listen to instead of talk at? Who am I willing to hold as they grow older and realer? Who am I willing to die a bit more for every day? Who am I willing to make heart-boring years with? Who am I willing to let bore a hole into my heart?

Get it: Life – and marriage proposals — isn’t not about one up-manship — it’s about one down-manship. It’s about the heart-boring years of sacrifice and going lower and serving. It’s not about how well you perform your proposal. It’s about how well you let Christ perform your life.

Sure, go ahead, have fun, make a ridiculously good memory and we’ll cheer loud: propose creatively — but never forget that what wows a woman and woos her is you how you purpose to live your life.

I’m praying, boys — be Men. Be one of the ‘boring” men – and let your heart be bore into. And know there are women who love that kind of man.

The kind of man whose romance isn’t flashy – because love is gritty.
The kind of man whose romance isn’t about cameras — because it’s about Christ.
The kind of man whose romance doesn’t have to go viral — because it’s going eternal.

No, your dad did not get down on one knee when he proposed – because the romantic men know it’s about living your whole life on your knees." by Ann Voskamp

“life often feels like . . ."

“life often feels like an organized assault 

on our sense of control.” 

by DAVID ZAHL on Jan 22, 2013 

                                                   http://www.mbird.com/
"It should come as no surprise that our hardwiring for control informs both of the top entries on the list: 1. the necessity to conceive of our life as a self-propelled narrative of progress (law) and 2. the absurd but no less widespread fallacy that death is  something we can control (rather than the definition of what we cannot). I think it was a certain father figure of mine who once said that “life often feels like an organized assault on our sense of control.” Christianity, of course, is at its most urgent and comforting when addressing people whose lives have not gone as planned and whose sense of control, especially in the face of death, has utterly failed them. "

“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through,” Conrad wrote in “Typhoon.” “Face it.” He was talking about more than storms.

Yadah in Hebrew . . . to hold out the hand

From: http://www.aholyexperience.com/
            Nov. 11, 2013

"And I peel squash and there is God and yada, yada, yada.

And yadah, it’s Hebrew, and it literally means to hold out the hand in four ways:

1. to bemoan with this wringing of hands.

2. or to revere with an extending of hands.

And this too on the page of the Strong’s Concordance:

3. Yadah means to confess.

4. Yadah means to give thanks.

Yadah –   the whisper of Psalms 92:1:

“It is a good thing to [yada] — give thanks – and sing praises to unto thy name, O most High.”

It is a good thing to yada: in the midst of the wringing of hands, to extend the hand.

It is a good thing to yada: hold out the hand — not as a fist to God, but in praise to God.

It is a good thing to yada: give thanks — to brazenly confess that God is wholly good though the world is horribly not.

You hear it — this scoffing yada, yada, yada — as if much and everywhere is banal, this aching meaninglessness that drones on and on.

And in the midst of genocides and suicides, the divorce and disease, the death and dark, we understand the yada all around us,  the holding up of fists at God instead of extending the hand in thanks and we empathize with the unbeliever’s confusion, because it’s our own confusion, and in this struggle to be grateful to God for always and for everything, we pray with humble earnestness for the unbeliever: because before a Good God haven’t we all been been momentary unbelievers?

And yet there it is, and you hear it now, at the cusp of the feasting, the yada, yada, yada, that sings relentless and bold:

We won’t stop confessing He is good and we won’t stop thanking Him for grace and we won’t stopholding out our hands — and taking His hand. We won’t stop believing that “God is good” is not some trite quip for the good days but a radical defiant cry for the terrible days.

That “God is good” is not a stale one-liner when all’s  happy but a saving lifeline when all’s hard.

And we will keep giving thanks, yada, yada, yada, because giving thanks is only this: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.

I’m holding the squash in hand. That’s what the mother had said standing there in her tsunami of grief: “I believe God is good. I believe that is all there really is.”

And every time I give thanks, I confess to the universe the goodness of God. I had touched her hand.

She had said it, her eyes so clear, like you could see straight into her, into all that remains.

The morning fog ebbs across harvested fields.

Thanksgiving in all things accepts the deep mystery of God through everything.

And there will be bowed heads around all the tables.

And there will be lights flickering brave to burn back the black, and there will be a believing in relentless redemption and a reaching out and around of all these hands,  reaching out in this yada, yada, yada, this steady confessing of the goodness of God — come whatever.

And there are leaves fallen frosted across the lawn.

Their confession glinting on and on…."