Do this in memory of me; or: as my memorial
Easter 5, 28th April, 2002
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Last Thursday, on Anzac Day, many Australians across the nation heard and said the words 'We will remember them', as part of a ceremony heavy with liturgical overtones, despite the fact that such ceremonies were originally designed to exclude formal prayer. I joined in them at a memorial in a country centre. And not dissimilarly, at every eucharist, Christian communities use the words 'recalling', 'remembering' and 'memorial'.
While it is something we may generally very much take for granted, for most human beings, memory – remembering – is an essential part of our life. It is not just an important ingredient: we could easily say that for most of us, memory is part of what defines us as individuals or communities and distinguishes us from others. Without memory, and the particular memories we have as individuals, or share as communities, we would be completely different. As individuals, our understandable fear of conditions like Alzheimers is based around our awareness of how important a functioning memory is as we identify ourselves – without it, we are a shadow. On Anzac Day, speakers at many different ceremonies claimed that the Australian community's collective memory of Anzac is one of the special characteristics of our national consciousness, something that defines us as Australians.
Memory not only defines us in some ways. It also empowers us. It is not just the intelligent leader gifted with both knowledge and a good memory that enables him or her to make crucial decisions in which an understanding of recent or more remote past enables the present and future to be negotiated. It is the source of confidence, a sense of control, for most of us in much more mundane situations. My mother, arriving at a nursing home, was asked (by me) whether she knew where she was. She not only named the street, she added quite correctly – 'I think Great Uncle Jeremiah lived here before the Great War'. It was as though like a domestic cat, he had marked the territory with a scent that made it acceptable. Memory of family history offered a sense of control over a new environment – by making it less new, territory already known in the mind.
The re-telling or re-reading of all kinds of stories gains part of its importance on may occasions from a combination of our own memories, and memories of the story as we have already heard it or read it. The great epic poems that go under the name of Homer derive some of their greatness from the fact that as we hear them present us with the narratives of great ones in the past, the heroes, our own experience is given meaning as he places them in the kind of situation that we too have experienced and recall. Few owners of aged pets fail to respond to the scene in the Odyssey which the old dog, once an affectionate and energetic, now too feeble to move, who happily recognises Odysseus on his return, and promptly dies. It is the kind of response of enduring recognition and affection that we too remember having encountered in our animals. We not only recognise the truthfulness of the experience; our experience is given meaning and dignity because it is of a kind the great heroes also knew.
We also remember and sift through stories, whether told in an imaginative, or more disciplined, historical way, because it is essential for our health and well-being. Just as individuals have something of the character of shadows when they have no memory, so communities that have no shared memory are impaired, basically unhealthy. We have head this said on many occasions recently about indigenous communities – and rightly so – namely, that loss of contact with tradition, culture, memory of the identity of past family and their stories, creates a real identity crisis, and that where people have been separated from such things, a real wholeness can only return when they come to know and retell those stories or have access to the facts that provide identity, and become a memory-bank to draw on dealing with all kinds of situations. It is equally necessary for the health of those of us of European, including those of Anglo-Celtic origins. It partly drives those who investigate their family trees; it lies too behind the increasing involvement of new generations in the recalling and retelling of our involvement in conflict, at a time when as a nation we continue to ask – who are we? Some of the answer, the young as well as the old believe, is found in the kind of stories recalled as Anzac Day approached; they are our Trojan wars, the wanderings of our ragged and disguised princes returning to a southern Ithaca.
And in the face of a culture which contains a stream that stresses the overriding significance only of the immediate present and ignores the past, this gives me hope for a transformation from within our wider culture, because at this point (the commemoration of Anzac Day) it has its own strong assertion of the importance of memory – even if it is weak at many others
But for us, there is something else about memory and remembering. It is one in which we can well argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made a distinct contribution. Where did history writing as we more generally understand it, originate? Not among the first compilers of chronicles, of year by year records of events in Mesopotamia. It was not the classical historians of Greece in the golden age of Athens or later in Rome who started the process of sifting through memories of dates, battles, and kings, in the conviction that somehow, the events that make up human lives are part of a pattern that has some underlying meaning: that some people and events are more significant than others. It was almost half a millenium before the golden age of the Greeks that some person or persons close to the court of King David, people with access to the inside story as known among some leading figures, put together the masterpiece of the story of the succession from David to Solomon, told in the books of Samuel. It was among a peculiar and small group on the edge of the Mediterranean, obsessed with their specialness, that history writing and analysis first sprang up.
Most of all, they conceived of God Himself remembering. No – not in the sense that He reminded Himself from time to time of events and moments past which he had temporarily forgotten. For God to remember was for Him to act in the present in a way consistent with His revelation of Himself in previous events. Past and present transecended, as God's consistency and faithfulness created a continuity, an eternal present. For our Jewish brothers and sisters, the events of the Passover are ongoing and continuously present, beyond the moments and events described in Exodus. For many Australians, the 'Lest we forget', the remembering of Anzac Day, is not just a recollection of a past from which they feel clearly separated, but a moment at which they sense that they are participating in something that is continously present.
And for the early Christian community, Jesus' promise that the meals that grew from the Last Supper would be His Memorial was not understood as an invitation to a nostalgic psychological act recalling a dead and long gone hero. It heard Jesus' words at the Last Supper as a promise about that Person, and those events, as an ongoing one. For us, it is a promise that, no matter how much we sense the separateness of many moments of time, in reality those moments are caught up in God's continuous present; in which past and present are not separated, but transcended.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)
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