November is the month of Remembrance. All Saints. All Souls. Remembrance Sunday. But our age has forgotten what it means truly to remember.
“Memory” is a quantity measured in Gigabytes on a computer, a smartphone or in a cloud. It has become a commodity, an “instant recall” of phone numbers and addresses that we no longer go to the effort of keeping in our mind.
We have lost the sense of “Memory” as a quality – a valuable part of who we are that we learn to appreciate all the more effectively through time, action and reflection.
To re-member is to piece something back together again in our minds and our spirits – and to do so in such a way that it leads to action, the making of a positive difference. When God “remembered” Noah and the animals afloat in the Ark, he did not lie back and smile. He did something. He drained the flood-waters! So when we “re-member” the heroes of faith, or our own dear ones whom we see no more, or those who have fallen in armed conflict, we put into practice the qualities they demonstrated which continue to inspire us.
When my mother knew she was facing her final few weeks of life, she summoned us as a family to plan her funeral. She insisted on one special quality: “Don’t shout so loud that God can’t be heard!” The priest we invited to take the service understood this with the quiet clarity which my mother wanted to bequeath to us. He spoke of how God spoke to the prophet Elijah not in the earthquake, wind or fire, but in the still, small voice. He remembered how Jesus oversaw the resurrection of his friend Lazarus from the dead through the tenderness of the tears that he had first wept. And this decisive, world-changing gentleness was what my mother wanted us to re-member of God when we prayed.
Re-membrance is, of course, at the heart of our Christian life – as, physically and spiritually, we re-member Christ in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. God re-members us, too! As we make a positive act in offering our own memories before God at this time of year, we are invited to look with hope towards the future. The theologian Hans Kung liked to think of the kingdom of God as “creation healed.” The re-membrance of Christ’s death on the Cross is from the perspective of his resurrection – the opening of Heaven’s gates – and a reminder that nothing and nobody is beyond the redeeming power of his vision: his love, mercy, forgiveness and reconciling hope.
To re-member is not simply a passive moment of recollection – but to go forward inspired by a fresh sense of possibility, hope and new horizons.
Rev Steve
St Margaret's Church Prestwich 