This past
Mother’s Day, Sarah and I were having coffee with Mom and Dad and my Auntie
Laurel and Uncle Don, and somewhere along the way they got talking about what
life was like during their childhoods.
“There were no supermarkets,” said
Uncle Don. Their memories grew
more and more elaborate as they recalled early-morning milk deliveries, fresh
baked bread from the bakery, old propane tanks along the house, tabs at the
corner store, woodstoves and glass pop bottles.
Remembering is a
key part of what it means to be human. We
could almost say that our memories are essential to who we know ourselves to
be. We reminisce over the
little moments, and we pay homage to the big events like where we’ve lived, who
we’ve known—who we’ve loved. When we take the time to savour
these memories, we find ourselves being drawn to see our lives as a story and
as a journey. We learn how
we came to be living here and now. Good remembering can teach us who we are.
Now there’s a
difference between a simple reminder and these sort of active, full-bodied acts
of remembering. Being
reminded is, I would like to think, a thing that happens to us—something outside tweaks our
brains to recollect a fact or appointment. “Dance Lessons @ 6:45”, “Pick up the kids @ 3:00”, “Get lettuce
on the way home.” That sort
of thing. Reminding might
lead to remembering, but it is not in and of itself of the same quality.
Remembering
involves action. We retell
the stories. We re-enact the moments. We draw others into the
memory. “Remember
when the van broke down with the wedding dress inside?” We allow the
meaning of an event or a person to saturate our minds, our hearts, and our
imaginations. It gets inside us. We become
changed.
If remembering is
so essential to human life, it is therefore essential to the Christian
life. The people of God are
called to be a remembering people. We
are a people who are being changed and made anew through the love of Him whose
life has invaded our lives: Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh and blood and
moved into the neighbourhood.” (John
1:14 The Message). When we immerse ourselves in the story
of Scripture we find that God is often teaching us that we must learn how to
remember well if we are to stay in stride with all that is going on in this
Father-created, Christ-redeemed, Spirit-blessed world. Take these stones, build this altar,
make a memorial, eat this meal. This
kind of remembering involves real people: hands and shoulders which carry altar
stones, feet to walk across riverbeds, voices raised in adoration, eyes lifted,
words spoken, legacy passed on. Biblically
speaking, remembering is an embodied thing. There’s more going on here than just
the firing off of electrons in our brains. Our whole selves are present
in active remembrance.
The Church is to
be a remembering people. She
is a community of memory and of hope. The
Bible draws our attention both to our pasts in gratitude, and to the future
glory in anticipation and expectation. We
live out our remembering in the present: in the already and not yet of the Christ's Kingdom. All
of this is bound together, sharpened, clarified, and exalted when we gather
together the worshipping, praying, witnessing community to the most poignant
act of remembrance: the sharing of a meal.
Alexander
Schmemann, one of our best writer-poet-pastors on the subject, gets us pointed
in the right direction: In Genesis we find that man is created
hungry. God provides for him trees and fruit, a garden, of which to
eat. God gives the world to man to become his food. In eating, man
takes the world into himself and it becomes sustenance to the flesh and blood
of man. The world is transformed into life.
In the Bible the
food that man eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live is
given to him by God, and it is given as communion
with God. . . . All that
exists is God’s fit to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make
manes life communion with God. It
is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and in biblical
language, that means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His
presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is
good.”[1]
So we come to the table, a place of family and sharing
together. We come to
eat. We take food into
ourselves and it nourishes us and is transformed into life. Only here, we find that Christ has
offered himself as food for us. He
becomes the Life which will nourish and sustain and transform us: “Take and eat. This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.”
As Stanley Grenz so right puts it: "We not only
announce the truth we also mysteriously participate in this grand
event."[2]
We retell the "old, old story", we respond to his gift of
himself to be our food--our nourishment, our sustenance--our life. He invites us to the table, to join with
the family for the meal.
And so we come: eating, remembering, and living.
“Let me go over with you again exactly what goes on in the Lord's Supper
and why it is so centrally important. I received my instructions from the
Master himself and passed them on to you. The Master, Jesus, on the night of
his betrayal, took bread. Having given thanks, he broke it and said,
This is my body, broken for
you.
Do this to remember me.
After supper, he did the same thing with the cup:
This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you.
Each time you drink this cup, remember me.
Do this to remember me.
After supper, he did the same thing with the cup:
This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you.
Each time you drink this cup, remember me.
What you must solemnly realize is that every
time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup, you reenact in your
words and actions the death of the Master. You will be drawn back to this meal
again and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed
contempt.”
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 The Message
[1]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 25.
