Remember the Lord

“Remember the Lord in a distant land” (Jeremiah 51:50)

Elie Wiesel is the famous author and interpreter of the holocaust, the writer of Night and some other forty books, and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. He experienced the holocaust as a young Jew, survived it, and gradually realized his call to write about it. He is one of those “great souls” as David Aikman called him, a voice that I am continually drawn to for the insight he has on the human condition. One of his most important messages is the need to remember rightly, to remember both our sufferings and the good that comes to us. Without memory, he says, we cease to live redemptive lives but endlessly repeat the sins of our human past. Only from the place of memory can we learn wisdom. Here are a few excerpts from his 1986 Nobel lecture:

Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void. “Forget,” they were told. “Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters.” Night after night, seemingly endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky. Fear dominated the universe.

New Year’s Day, Rash Hashana, is also called Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory. On that day, the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if he refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters…

For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible.

Elie Wiesel is one of those rare voices that speak with an eloquence born out of intimate knowledge. His call to remember is profoundly right, and a necessary message for our time.

This morning, my reading through Jeremiah brought me to this most important text: “Remember the Lord in a distant land; and let Jerusalem come into your mind” (51:50). The story of Jeremiah’s prophecy and Israel’s forgetfulness had brought them to this moment, the beginning of Israel’s exile in Babylon. From this point forward, their memory of Jerusalem will be crucial to their survival as a people. Few nations survive apart from their own land. Jeremiah’s call to remember was the call to “keep in mind” the whole long story of Israel, their covenant connection to God, their understanding of the character and faithfulness of the God who had called them into being, their record of sacred history which guided them, and their hope for the future because of all this. Remember the Lord.

We live in a forgetful age. We have enjoyed an unparalleled time of material prosperity and peace but we hardly know the history that provided this possibility. We assume that we are where we are because we are innovators, entrepreneurs, change-agents. We have little appreciation for the spiritual grounding of our culture, the Biblical moorings which have allowed us to reach our present heights. We cannot remember such things because we have been cut off from the essence of our past. Our celebration of the youth culture has placed too much pressure on those without memory to interpret life for us. And those further along the road of life have not always developed the necessary skill and understanding of life’s greatest lesson. Experience, it seems, easily collapses before the gods of innovation and change. But let me simply assert what Jeremiah asserts: that whether we realize it or not, memory is necessary to survival; spiritual survival, to be sure, but also human survival.

This command to remember the Lord is one of ultimate hope. As for me, this morning, I have been recalling all the way God has led me and spoke to me. I dare not forget, for myself, but also for the sake of those I am called to serve.

Beauty

One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)

In my morning reading of the daily office, I was struck by the idea of beauty as it applied to our pursuit of God.  We are, after all, seekers of beauty.  As human beings, we seek to understand and celebrate beauty in our arts, that is, if we actually believe in beauty.  Much of the artistic bent of the 20th century was a nihilistic exercise in ugliness, but we can’t live there for very long.  Beauty draws us back as moths to the flame.

And so we learn to create beauty in the way we live, in the myriad of design elements around us that all please us with their form and aesthetic.  We learn that we cannot be simply functional, that life is more than sustaining our practical efficiency.  We want to — we need to — find the beautiful, create the beautiful, celebrate the beautiful.  Of course, we get confused and miss so much of what beauty is, often missing deeper loveliness for superficial and fleeting things.  Our culture can be quite cruel in the way it evaluates human beauty — beautiful bodies are celebrated while beautiful souls are hardly on the radar.  But hopefully, through the course of a long life, we learn a few things about what true beauty is.  And if we are wise, we pursue that deeper and more lasting form of the beautiful and lovely.

The apostle suggested that we could live connected to beauty if we would  focus our daily thoughts and conversations accordingly:

…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.  (Philippians 4:8)

So today’s task is to look for beauty and to celebrate it, not just for itself, but because of the way the beauty around us points toward, and draws us into, the beauty of God.  Whether we know it or not, the beauty of God is what we are really looking for.  And while we notice and enjoy the beauty of what he has made, it is what we have not yet seen — his very self — that will truly satisfy our hunger for beauty.  For the beauty of God is what we have been created to discover and enjoy, as the famous opening line of the Westminster Catechism Shorter Catechism says: “man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever”.

I think I will now spend my day practicing this way of living.

Memory and Faith

"And don’t you remember?" (Mark 8:18)

The loss of vital memory is pictured in Scripture as more than a failure of mental capability.  In terms of the life of faith, forgetfulness can be crippling indeed.  A failure to retain in mind the words and works of God will inevitably keep us from seeing the whole long story of God, and pinch our ability to see the meaning of our present moment in the story.  For without memory, we fail to connect in any meaningful way to what God is doing and saying right now.  Without memory, the meaning and resonance of the story of God — and our place in the story — is lost to us.  Memory in this sense is the indispensible faculty for the life of faith.

The words quoted above are those of Jesus to his disciples after they have failed to see what they should have seen.  Jesus is astonished how they have misunderstood the moment.  He refers his followers to past events that they should have held together with what they just missed.  He wanted them to see a pattern and to learn from it.  Their failure to understand was directly attributable to their forgetfulness of the past.  Jesus wants them to learn to tie things together and so he rehearses the stories of the past; he asks them if they can see any light emerging , any common thread, any pattern.  He does not interpret the meaning directly but merely asks his disciples to use their memories, to hold all of his words and works before their conscious minds.  Only when they learn to do that will they be present to any particular moment; only when they remember the past will they be given insight into the significance of what is happening before them.  Without memory, one cannot live the life of faith.

We too are called to remember, and so to understand.  If we are mature, we understand that the moments of our lives (good or bad, pleasant or difficult) need the context of our whole life to be understood.  It is in the fullness of our life that we understand the meaning of any particular day.  In the same way, no word or action of God should be interpreted by itself, as if it were isolated from the rest.    It is in the company of all that God is, all that he has said and all that he has done, that we know him and trust him.  Our faith is informed not only by the experience of our moments, but how all of those moments fit together and are held before our memory.  When we remember well, we live so much more wisely.  Otherwise, as so often happens with us, a moment rushes upon us and we miss it’s meaning — and all because of our forgetfulness.

The next time you read a novel and suddenly find yourself lost in the details, remember this truth for your life.  Remember how important it is to remember.  Just as you might need to go back and review what has happened so far in your reading, realize that this may be what precisely what is required in the story of your life.  And the reason is simple: only by remembering the past can we understanding the meaning of the present moment.  Can you keep it all together?

For homework study Deuteronomy 8.

 

Friendship and the Life of Goodness

I am thinking about goodness (godlikeness, holiness) and the role of friendship in the transformation of our souls. And while friendship is a clearly seen good, the other values mentioned – godlikeness and holiness – seem to be out of fashion these days. We tend to hear such words as an oppressive impossibility, laying upon us a joyless burden that our humanity cannot bear. But the opposite is true. Spiritual growth, the transformation of our souls towards a greater godlike goodness, is the only way we will ever find true happiness or our truest human self. There is no other worthy goal for living, and no other way to realize the deepest longings within us. Goodness-godlikeness-holiness is the way we realize what we were meant to be.

Thomas Merton is certainly the most famous writing monk of modern times. Before his conversion to the church, he lived a rather dissolute life, pursuing the normal list of selfish pleasures, working on a writing career for the sake of his own egotistical ends. In time he came to Christian faith and converted to the church. But it was after he converted that a moment of startling clarity came to him. It happened so simply.

One day, as Merton walked down a New York street with his friend Lax, his friend commented that the only worthwhile ambition was to be a saint. Then he added that to be a saint required that one wanted it badly enough. Merton pondered this and told another friend about the conversation. To his surprise that friend simply replied, “of course” (Monica Furlong. Merton: A Biography.  Harper and Row, 1980. p. 82).

Merton was both amazed and somehow “straightened up” by this insight. It was an energizing and clarifying truth, and it showed Merton what was possible. Merton’s subsequent story shows how those conversations with his friends were instrumental to his second conversion, his life’s path. For if his first conversion was to Christ and the church, his second was to take seriously the way of a pilgrim into holiness, the only truly worthwhile goal.

Sainthood is simply human goodness. It is the soul’s realization of a more godlike character. It comes about by the cooperative work of God’s Spirit and our own personal desire to grow towards the humanity that Jesus expressed. And this is vitally important: it is revealed in as many different forms as there are persons who follow this way. For sainthood is not a list of noticeable behaviours or noble actions. While we tend to notice saints for what they do and say, we should first see that the basis for doing good is sourced in the quality of being good. Sainthood is the character of goodness revealed in a countless variety of good words and good actions. You know a saint when you meet one.

Saints are found living and working in every conceivable variety of life situations, flavouring the world with their unique and irreplaceable selves. I have known and know a few of them. They discover their humanity by the liberating way of goodness or godlikeness. Their personal ambitions, sacrificed to the way of goodness, are not entirely lost to them. For often the way of goodness brings its gracious surprise: their previous ambition finds a new and elevated form of expression. Merton did become the writer he wanted to be, but it came in a way he never expected, for only in the pursuit of his own goodness did his gift find its rightful place.

Back to my first point: the surprising influence of his friends in this matter should not be overlooked. We are being nudged towards goodness or towards sin daily, and it is our relationships that greatly impact our life trajectory. Choose your friends wisely; take notice of how they help or hinder your growth towards goodness. And then consider what you might say to someone, or simply be for someone, that might set them on a new and better path. While your life’s story is being written by the gracious hand of God, you may become part of some wonderful stories that are not your own.

There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale

And the end of all our exploration
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
TS Eliot, Little Gidding

For years I have kept journal notebooks.  They contain my musings on Scripture, my prayers and hopes, and the record of my inner and outer life.  It usually takes about two years to fill up a few hundred pages.

Every once in a while, I look back and recount my steps.  This helps me remember what I need to remember, and it helps me gain a sense of the direction and pattern of my life.  My journals serve my memory and keep my life from becoming too fragmented with event and circumstance.  It helps me re-member (put back together) the pieces of my life and therefore keeps me hopeful.  As I wrote a few blogs ago, Biblical hope is not only for the future.  It is also a way to see meaning in the past.

In the middle of last winter I named my current journal “There and Back Again: A Hobbits Tale”.  Being both a Tolkien fan and one who is interested in the basic idea of a storied life, I could find no better way to describe what I was going through.  My tale, I said to myself, was about departure and return, about being given a direction early in life (a vocation), about wandering and stalling somewhat in mid-life, but about finally regaining that sense of direction and heading home.  To be truthful, I did not yet know what this idea of “return” might look like.  And so, through the winter, I regularly wrote about possible outcomes and scenarios.  Most everything I chased either shifted or evaporated before me, but I intuitively knew – and how I do not know – that the process of this last year was about return.  And so I named my current notebook, “there and back again”.

Last fall, with a host of empty pages yet to be filled, I wrote in my journal that I would write myself forward into my next stage of life. That process took some months, but yesterday morning I finished the final page.  Now I begin a new chapter in a new book.  I am surprised at where my personal story is in fact going.  Surprised maybe not the word for it; gratified and humbled may be a better word.  For in the last analysis, God writes our story and, apparently, he loves good endings.  With an undiminished sense of vocation, but hopefully wiser from being further along the path, I travel forward into the call of God that is before me.  Returning to where I was before, I think I will know the place as if for the first time.