I once took a day to retrace my life growing up in Asheville, North Carolina. The houses we lived in, the schools I attended, the homes of my family and friends, and even the cemeteries where my loved ones are buried. It was truly a spiritual experience.
The writings of Forrest Church have helped me to begin thinking about the relationship of memory to meaning. If you think about it, the meaning of our lives does not emerge from the accumulation of everything we have experienced. Rather, who we are is determined by the memories we choose to keep from all the past events of our lives.
Siblings growing up in the same household remember their lives differently. The memories they select, and how they arrange those memories, is what gives their lives meaning. Within every life there is enough material for us to construct thousands of alternative life stories.
Think about the way you arrange your own memories, distill them, rework them, perfect them (and not always by making them faithful to the facts). Meaning in our life comes from fashioning and re-fashioning our memories into a coherent pattern. We organize our past in ways that prove most conducive to wholeness, reconciliation, and hope.
And this is where God, the Great Alchemist, can help us most. He helps us see with eyes of grace. A “graced” memory is a different memory. The great poet Robert Frost once wrote in one of his poems, “Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
Robert Frost is talking about remembering well, re-membering, literally putting your past back together with “grace-filled” eyes. My little story has been caught up into a much larger story and, because it has, my past is no longer the same. It has taken on new meaning.
Before going to sleep tonight, meditate on the astounding promise God gives his people in Joel 2:25: “And I will restore unto you the wasted years, the years the locusts have eaten.”
Richard Hipps
Poetry is the most powerful way to re-member. Poets give us experience and the past in the most beautiful way.
Memories of my childhood often appear unbidden, just a brief picture of a memorable moment, nothing earth shattering, just a flashback to a simpler time in life when joy, laughter, spontaneity were a way of life. Perhaps a time in the garden with my mother, fishing with my dad, or out horseback riding, often by myself, sometimes with friends. I would ride for hours going nowhere, yet going everywhere in my mind. The stories lifted from books as I was raised by myself. My half brother was 17 when I was born. She would have him watch me while she was working in the garden etc and he would read to me, what ever he was reading at the time- I heard The Illiad, Tobacco Road, Rubiat, newspapers, before I could focus my eyes, but all good things come to an end. I was born in June, Joe left for the service [WW II] in Dec. It seems I have varied off the chosen topic a little and I am rambling. I do have flight of ideas.