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Easter 7 In recent days, as most of you are aware, I have been in the West of Ireland. Those of you who have been this small, green corner of the world know it is a place of heart-breaking beauty and haunting mystery. To that, I would add, it is a place brimming over with memory. Memory. It is the indelible mark of our humanity. As the Greek poet Aeschylus wrote 2500 years ago, memory is the mother of all wisdom. In our memory, all things abide. All times and places draw nigh. All souls become one. Memory has always been the lodestone of human faculties. It lives in legends and myths, it is the oxygen that animates the human spirit, it is the one thing that stands between dignity and degradation in us as a species. Memory is also the foundation of faith. It was at the heart of Israel’s history. Of all the things commanded in scripture, to remember was the supreme law. “Remember that you were a wandering Aramean”, the Lord instructs the chosen people, “Remember how I delivered you out of the hands of the Egyptians.” Memory was a life or death proposition. When the people of Israel’s memory was lost or forgotten, they perished. When they remembered, and repented, they were saved. The first followers of Jesus embraced this admonition. So critical was memory for the early believers, that they chose a Greek word to enshrine it. Anamnesis it was called. Anamnesis gave birth to the Church’s chief sacrament, the Eucharist. In anamnesis, in memory, bread and wine are transformed into the Risen Christ’s body and blood. Those early believers recalled how Jesus himself was drawn to memory. “Remember me this way,” he said as he ate his last supper with them. “Remember those you have given me,” he prayed to his Father, “that they may be one even as we are one.” Memory takes us into the depths of the divine life and our own. And in a place like the West of Ireland, memory is everywhere. In stone circles and megalith tombs and holy wells, in the melding of the pagan past with the Christian present. Memory is even older still, radiating in the landscape, sweeping out of the sea, and reaching forth from the highlands. I went to Ireland to paint and to pray. And as I reflect on it upon returning, I went to Ireland also to remember. Not my ancestry, mind you, because I have no Irish blood. But that is of little consequence there. In Ireland, as my good friend Padraig MacSweeney said, “it is not who you are, but where you come from.” It is the place itself where memory lives. In these past few years, in painting landscapes, I have found a deeper, richer way to pray. The landscape speaks to me, or should I say, something in the landscape speaks, like a burning bush, like a dove returning to a seabound ark. “ Paint me,” the land before me says, “for I am the place of memory, I am the face of beauty, I am the heart of God.” So, way out on the rain drenched cliffs of the Beara Peninsula, and in the lush groves encircling Glenstal Abbey in Limerick, and verdant pastures of Sligo and moors of Donegal, I set memory upon a canvas, very imperfectly, very imprecisely, a palette knife here, a brush there, at times, I swear to God, hearing as I labored ancient voices in the breeze, whispering a prayer, something like: “may they be one even as we are one.” That the Celts in their memory embrace this oneness is no secret anymore. Somehow they survived the great rupture in Western Civilization when the seer and the seen became different, irreconcilable. In the West of Ireland, despite all conquering attempts to divide it, this unity still lives on. And because of this, I feel like I am home again in Ireland. I can’t say why, but I really feel I’m home. Even more at home than in the country that gave me my birth and national identity For in America, we have always been uneasy about memory. We have been predisposed to deception and denial. Someone once said that a nation’s life is about as long as its reverential memory. There are precious few things we revere things in this country anymore. Not the land. Not the honor and sacrifice of those who came before us. Not even the values that once made us great. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness have all become commodities on the open market, sold to the highest bidder. We increasingly suffer from amnesia as a people, forgetting who we are and what we are called to be. In returning now from a place where memory is still vibrant and alive, I have to tell you there is something very sad and ironic about the holiday we celebrate this weekend. For Memorial Day should be for us a time to remember together who and what God wants us to be. This day should be a true day of memory. Thank God we have many of you here still who can remember, who do remember, the goodness and grace of this land. Thank God we have someone like Pete Gouger who carries our flag with the true memory of what it stands for. All of this turns my eyes and my heart to a landscape and a time when the first Memorial Day was promulgated. The landscape is a blood-soaked battlefield outside the tiny town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, bearing the living memory of the greatest carnage we have ever known as a nation. Over the soul-wrenching tableau, a beleagured president, Abraham Lincoln, rises sand speaks these words, calling the nation “to the great task remaining before us, that we here highly resolve that these dead have not died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” On this day, as individuals and as Americans, let us remember, let us never forget that it is anamnesis, which makes us human. Memory is what keeps us fully alive. Amnesia, on the other hand, is what strips our humanity away. To forget, to lose our memory, is a fate worse than death. Let us on this holiday, on this holy day, hold fast to our memory, in the knowledge and faith, that it is here that we abide in God, and God abides in us.
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