Re-Membering it Forward, part 1: an introduction to re-membering

(This blog series explores re-membering as a way to ground us wholly in the Holy. This blog introduces the topic.)

We encounter quite a few instances of “remembering” in the Old Testament. For example, God “remembers” with a rainbow and with a covenant to Abraham. We also see that ancient Israel struggles to remember properly – they are invited to remember God’s mighty deliverance from slavery, yet they tend to idealize the past by remembering the food of their slavery. Throughout Scripture, and especially in the prophets, we see that God’s holy invitation to remembering is to remember the right things, or in other words, to remember rightly.

First though, I want to make a distinction between forgetting and remembering wrongly. Most of us have probably heard some version of “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Remembering wrongly doesn’t so much repeat the past as it fixates on the wrong things, which negatively affects our present and future. Like ancient Israel, sometimes I remember wrongly by idealizing negative aspects of the past – forgetting the injustice or harm of the circumstance. So, maybe forgetting and remembering wrongly are two sides of the same coin.

Sometimes I struggle with re-membering by remembering the wrong things, like my faults and failures and giving in to fears – and from stories others have shared with me over the past two decades I know I am not alone in this. At times, we dwell upon the wrong things we have done, the good things we have left undone, or the harmful things that others have done to us.

Another pitfall of remembering besides idealizing the past is getting stuck in the past, by which I mean falling prey to the thinking that we’ve already “been there and done that” so we do not have to keep doing and serving, growing and learning…

These things make me wonder about how we can ground ourselves in the right kind of remembering. As Christians, we have invitations to remember rightly, and in doing so we remember not only Where We Are, yet also Whose We Are, Who We Are, and Why We Are.

I think one of the biggest hurdles in writing this blog series came in deciding on a name. “Remembering the Future” and “Remembering Ahead” and “Beautiful Reminders” didn’t quite capture what I hope to accomplish in this blog – although remembering rightly moves us ahead into future possibilities while we await the full coming of the Kingdom, which is our hope of the future and can be beautiful now.

Re-Membering it Forward combines a couple different aspects helpful in my thinking.

One is re-membering, in the hyphenated form. I heard a lecture about 25 years ago – now I can’t remember who presented nor the topic – in which the speaker referenced re-membering in its hyphenated form. Remembering rightly puts things in proper order – it heals, it restores, it re-members, as in taking formerly joined members and rejoining these separated members back into wholeness. Re-membering rightly restores us wholly – to God, to ourselves, to one another, and to all of creation.

Two, I think of the popular phrase from awhile back: “paying it forward.” The gist being that a person does something now for future benefit to someone else – essentially making that person’s present better (which I will call their “Future-Present” – it occurs in the future, yet will actually be experienced as the “present” when it happens). In turn, that person will keep up the momentum to make someone else’s future-present better. In Re-membering It Forward, I want to explore how Christian practices of re-membering both heal the present and also invest in the future-present of self, community and Creation.

Over the next couple of blog posts I want to explore a few of the ways that Christians can re-member rightly, and in doing so, hopefully ground ourselves in God’s love and the gift of life to its full in ever deeper and truer ways.

Here’s a glimpse:

1. Physical things – like the beautiful tin my aunt has or the prayer beads I wear on my wrist.

2. Sanctified Imagination - reading in between the lines and behind the text of Scripture.

3. Praying the Psalms – as individuals and as a community, joins our stories to God’s great story.

4. Reflecting our true image – we are Imago Dei, created in the image of God; and we can reflect God’s image to ourselves, others, and the world in a way that restores relationships.