Resurrection of Memory
Who isn’t haunted by their memories? Try as we might to escape the darkness of the past we cannot help but to turn our face to past traumas. We push them back behind us and far away, but they return as unwelcome ghosts come to spoil our present desires and future hopes. Our memories condition and shape how we respond to the present, we cannot disconnect from our historical selves, we don’t interact with the world in a vacuum. These not-so-forgotten memories of hurts and fears make us- at least they make part of us. So what then can we do with these unbearable burdens?
This life is a gradual revealing of who Christ is calling us to be, each twist and turn, each snare and tear guiding us toward our final end. As we bear each trauma we gradually discover who we are. Senseless violence and violation sharpens our desire for justice, whilst disappointments and failures point back to a greater hope. In the face of such trials DH Lawrence observes: ‘then I must know that still/ I am in the hands of the unknown God,/ He is breaking down to His own oblivion,/ to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.’ In this framework these painful memories become part of our emotional-spiritual DNA, they seem to be a necessary destination on this journey which is best left in the past.
This idea, that trauma is a contingent episode in our stories, is present in the Gospel: without the desolation of the crucifixion there cannot have been any glory in the resurrection. However, in Christ’s life there is indeed a profound presentness of His past sufferings. In the days after the resurrection he bears the scars in His hands and a wound in His side. He returns to the friends who betrayed Him and chooses them to be His witnesses in the world. The crucifixion is not a way station, a stage of His journey left in the past, it was and still is a present reality.
Christ fully recognised His pain and surrendered it to God. In an act of perfect praise Jesus gave control of His trauma completely over to God. Through Christ’s complete surrender, God transformed a criminal’s death, the symbol of humiliation and fear, into something beautiful and life giving. At Calvary we see a crasis between desolation and love in which life does not just defeat death but transfigures it into something divine.
Perhaps then this is what we must do with memory. To recognise that we are vulnerable children of God and that our only option is to give over these bitter remembrances to Him. Like Christ on the cross we are powerless and defeated, but our faith tells us that death does not have the final word. The Kingdom of God is at hand, it is here, present with us now, but only when we allow Him to resurrect our past and present selves can we taste its sweetness.
