Followers of this blog will be getting used to the slower output of material to read and discuss on Surviving Church.   After over ten years and a million and half words of output, it was inevitable that your editor would find that ideas for reflection and comment would become less regular and routine.  In the past I found that there were sometimes several ideas inside my head at once, waiting for an opportunity to be articulated.  Now I have to be patient in waiting for something to strike my thinking.  Blog ideas are often inspired by something in the news or something we are made aware of by our participation in one of the seasons of the church’s year.   The regular rhythm of these different liturgical seasons commemorated by the church has always provided rich material to ponder.  The internet itself provides material for reflection as we travel with the help of our liturgy and its accompanying music from one Christian season to another.

As I write these words (on the Friday before Remembrance Sunday) I am acutely aware of the way that this time of year presents us with two very solemn moments for commemoration. The first is the feast of All Souls when many churches invite their congregations to come together to read out names of the departed in front of the altar.  Candles are lit and this simple physical act allows us to believe that those who have died and are seen no more, are in some sense alive in the presence of God.  The second commemoration on Remembrance Sunday extends our remembering beyond the circle of immediate family and friends.  It identifies with the nation’s grieving for all who sacrificed their lives in fighting and helping to preserve the nation in the face of threats to its identity.  The word that joins both these events is the simple word remember.  Remembering members of our families who have died and the young men and women who sacrificed everything to defend the nation are solemn acts and ones that we should never let go.   To do so would impoverish something very deep within us.

What does remembering a deceased person actually involve?  At the very least It means thinking about them and bringing them into our memories so that their existence as members of the human race is acknowledged.  We all hope to be remembered when we have left this earth, even if the only people who remember us for a time are the members of our families.  We do, of course, live in some sense through our genes but there is something important about being remembered by those who come after us.  It is important for us now to know that those who will think about us when we are gone will have memories suffused with affection and some degree of gratitude that we existed.   

In thinking about the act of remembering the dead, it is helpful to be reminded of the very different perspective contained in the Hebrew bible.  Here we are introduced to some different ideas about memory as well as a strikingly different attitude towards time.  We think of time as a continuing sequence of events.  When things happen, they then quickly become part of the past; they are never going to happen again in the same way.  The effects caused by past events may still linger on, but the actual event can never be fully retrieved. For the Hebrew/Jewish mind there are certain episodes in the past that are remembered in a special way.  These are pivotal and archetypal moments and they are those involved with the Jewish belief that God has actively intervened in particular historical events to save his people.  If God acted to save his people from the plagues in Egypt or at the crossing of the Red Sea, then the hope is that he can and will remember his people again in the present and in the future.  Much of Jewish prayer is the request to God to ‘remember’ his actions in the past so that he will accomplish the same saving acts in the context of a new historical crisis.  The Hebrew way of thinking believes that ‘reminding’ God of what he has already done is a legitimate part of prayer. 

A further dimension of memory which is present in Jewish prayer is found in the sacrificial system practised in biblical times.  It is hard for us to enter the mentality that believed killing animals was somehow part of what God required of his people, but there is an understandable logic at work in this practice.  Killing animals and either spreading their blood around or burning them whole has little to commend it today in the West.  But underlying the practice is the transactional idea that one can give to God so that he will look favourably on his people.  The idea that we are required to give of ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’ as an offering to obtain favour from God is one that is found everywhere in the pages of Scripture.   For me the classic transactional idea in Scripture is clearly set out in Psalm 132.  The psalmist in the first verse pleads to Yahweh to remember David.    At this point David is not alive but his action in building the Temple, ‘a habitation for the mighty God of Jacob’, allows the psalmist to expect in return for what David did, Yahweh will maintain David’s line and the city of Jerusalem for ever under his protection.  Episodes from the past which demonstrate God’s power and protection for his people can always be liturgically remembered so that the same power can be experienced today.

I think I must have at some point in past blog posts spoken about the way that this way of thinking about remembering a past event, so that it can be re-experienced or re-played in the present, is important as we try to understand the meaning of ‘memorial’ in the context of the Eucharist.  To remember the death of Christ is, in this Jewish framework of understanding, to make that death and all that flows from it present and available to us today.  This highly enriched understanding of the word memory is not obvious to us today, but it becomes clear when we have allowed ourselves to share the Hebrew understanding of what it means to remember something in the past where God was unambiguously at work.  Our English word remember makes it less easy to glimpse the full dynamic of what is involved with Jews remembering the Passover, or Christians remembering the self-offering of Christ on the Cross.

To summarise these rich ideas about the way that time, for the Jewish thinker, is sometimes collapsed so that the past can be brought into close relationship with the present, helps to penetrate the deeper meaning of memory as we are thinking about this season of Remembrance.  Remembrance Sunday and All Souls Day are both acts of giving honour and respect to groups who are no longer with us.  To remember is to place the dead in the hands and mercy of God.  A summary of what we want and pray for them is that the departed are given life by being ‘remembered’ by God.  We do not know exactly what that might mean in practice, but clearly, we want to live in the mind of God as the departed live within our minds and affections.