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.