Day 1 - Waiting to Remember

Speaking of things sneaking up on me, these words of Barbara Brown Taylor [Leaving Church, p. 140] caught my attention several weeks ago. She describes her own entry into the world of Sabbath. Her entry was a lot rougher than mine, so I don’t know if this is going to happen to me or not. I do suspect that the removal of a lot of busyness will allow lots of things to come back to mind. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. It also becomes the breeding ground for creativity.

If you decide to live on the fire that God has kindled inside of you instead of rushing out to find some sticks to rub together, then it does not take long for all sorts of feelings to come out of hiding . You can find yourself crying buckets of uncried tears over things you thought you had handled years ago. People you have loved and lost can show up with their ghostly lawn chairs, announcing they have nowhere else they have to be all day. While you are talking with them, you may gradually become aware of an aching leg and look down and see a bruise on your thigh that you did not know you had. How many other collisions did you ignore in your rush from here to there?

Frederick Buechner [Secrets in the Dark, p. 60] speaks of how we keep ourselves busy to avoid having to really think about our lives. Maybe there’s too much pain in the past? We turn on the TV, the radio; we do this or that. Distraction, after blessed distraction. We need escape from reality. Buechner challenges all this:

But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to the long journeys of our lives with all their twistings and turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

So much has happened to us all over the years. So much has happened within us and through us. We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare. That’s what entering the room means, I think. It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as searching and finding. The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose to, and the process of entering it is not unlike the process of praying, because praying too is a slow journey—a search to find the truth of our own lives at their deepest and dearest, a search to understand, to hear and to be heard.