I enjoyed this Remembrance Day as good message and a reminder what memory really is about. As I cycled across the city I kept coming across acts of remembrance - a company of soldiers on parade blocking traffic on a main street; Roads closed off; Four howitzers and accompanying soldiers ready to fire a salute - including an officer handing out earplugs to the crowd; Planes gathering in the sky for a fly past.
But this is not quite the same as a Christian act of remembering. We have to re-enact the event thus communion is a re-enactment of the Last Supper, a reliving of the event that opened the Passion of Jesus and encapsulates it in one act. I am indebted to Robert Webber's numerous writings of the importance of this whole idea. Anastasios, Archbishop of Tirana, Durres and All Albania has asserted the importance of remembrance, anamnesis.
...the fundamental anamnesis which defines our Christian identity: [is] the remembrance of the amazing intervention of God in the life of humanity. The remembrance, in faith and dedication, of the economy of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit determines our self-consciousness. It is from this that all other things begin and draw their meaning.As I listened to my friend Euge speaking, my thoughts wandered to Augustine and the section at the back of his Confessions in Book 10. Augustine asks to know God as well as God knows him but he cannot know himself fully, and therefore he cannot know God fully so he asks how he can even know God. The cosmos testifies to its creator, but the cosmos is not God. Animals have senses but they cannot moved beyond the physical. For Augustine here is memory's role. How can you move beyond memory to knowledge of God? If you forget something, you search for an image in your memory. People desire to be happy, but how do people know of happiness? True happiness is only found with God. Humans confuse earthly happiness for the happiness found in God; they in this confusion become miserable, for God is not a sense perception, an emotion, or even the mind itself, yet God's goodness remains in memory.
For Augustine knowledge of self brings knowledge of God. Introspection and self-absorption are not real knowledge of the self. The kind of self-knowledge that Augustine wants is a realistic understanding of the inner workings of the human person recognising that God initiates and they should return to the initiator. Knowledge of God is knowledge of the activity of God and in particular only within the mechanism of memory, returning to the beginning and the end, alpha and omega.
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel... 2 Tim 2:8
