We all have memories that we treasure, memories of our family and friends or memories of accomplishments. We also all have memories that torment us, memories of times when we have failed and been failed by others. Memory, both positive and negative, is critical to our spirituality, serving as a foundational aspect of our worship of the Triune God. Israel was commanded to remember God's mighty actions throughout history. At the Lord's Table we remember Christ's body and blood given for us. But remembrance, both biblically and theologically, is no passive act. Rather, through remembrance, we participate in God's activity. Memory creates our life's context, not only by recalling the past, but by establishing the present and anticipating the future. Rowan Williams, in Resurrection, connects memory with hope.
What happens in the resurrection is that this memory is given back in a particular kind of context - in the presence of Jesus. I wrote at the beginning of this chapter that 'God is the "presence" to which all reality is present.' So to be with God is to be (potentially) present to, aware of, all of one's self and one's past; which is why, as St John repeatedly reminds us, presence to God can be excruciating, and some will hate and reject the possibility. But when that God is revealed and embodied and 'specified' in Jesus, the victim who will not condemn, we can receive it. If God's presence is Jesus' presence, the past can be borne. For the Lord who returns, bringing our memory with him, is, as he always was, the Lord who waits on our love: 'Simon, son of John, do you love me?' He asks us to respond to him, engage with him; he proposes a new stage of relationship. Peter's fellowship with the Lord is not over, not ruined, it still exists and is alive because Jesus invites him to explore it further. Here the past is returned within a lived relationship that is evidently moving and growing. To know that Jesus still invites is to know that he accepts, forgives, bears and absorbs the hurt done: to hear the invitation is to know oneself forgiven, and vice versa.But will there come a time when memory will cease? Does the 'remembrance of hell negate heaven?' Will God not one day forget? "I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more" (Jeremiah 31:34). Miroslav Volf, in Exclusion and Embrace, discusses this final act of nonremembrance, and how it may affect us in the present.
It does [affect us] - provided we do not forget that, as long as the Messiah has not come in glory, for the sake of the victims, we must keep alive the memory of their suffering; we must know it, we must remember it, and we must say it out loud for all to hear. This indispensable remembering should be guided, however, by the vision of that same redemption that will one day make us lose the memory of hurts suffered and offenses committed against us. For ultimately, forgetting the suffering is better than remembering it, because wholeness is better than brokenness, the communion of love better than the distance of suspicion, harmony better than disharmony. We remember now in order that we may forget then; and we will forget then in order that we may love without reservation. Though we would be unwise to drop the shield of memory from our hands before the dawn of the new age, we may be able to move it cautiously to the side by opening our arms to embrace the other, even the former enemy.Thoughts?