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.”