Memory as Living Presence

Mosaic of the Virgin Mary in the church of Hagia Sofia

Much of our mortal lifetime involves navigating such a haze of delights and hurts so tumbled together in mixed experiences (wheat and tares) of realities and counterfeits, wholenesses and fragmentations, goodnesses and evils that we should, as taught by Jesus the Anointed, refrain from judgement. God judges us from the manger and the cross by joining his life to our death so that—even while dying—we might learn to live as God lives: by the perfect giving and receiving of self-emptying love. Our collective flight from God’s life is thereby constrained and made to be, still—even at its farthest limits—divine participation. We should not judge, but we should seek and receive. We should need and hunger and, even, make and give. Each present moment is, potentially, a simultaneous taking up of gifts that have always been on offer and an offering up of thanksgiving that invites others to receive as well. Within such a dynamic and divine mode of living, memory is never past or dead but is always present and filled with the active offerings of loved ones from across all the shattered pieces of fallen time.

But our hearts and our vision tend in many directions at once, and we are rarely fully present in each moment. Books on prayer (such as Bread & Water, Wine & Oil: An Orthodox Christian Experience of God by Father Meletios Webber) teach that God only exists in the present. We cannot find God in our past or our future because our present moment is the only place where we are, and the present is therefore the only place where we are with God. Because of this, prayer largely consists in learning to occupy the present moment, and in avoiding the pull and drag of our thoughts into our imagined past or future. Our relationships with our memories of the past are characterized by passions such as regret and anger or sentimental longing and nostalgia, and we easily follow our thoughts back into the past to nurse these feelings. In a similar dynamic, the future inspires worry and fear or longing and ambition. Between these powerful emotions surrounding us from behind and before, as it were, our thoughts are rarely at rest in the present moment where we can learn to behold our neighbors and God with us.

Amid the churn and confusion of an existence that can so easily sweep us up in a thousand vain pursuits, nature’s seasons and the church’s festival days can slow us down. They recall for us a greater time within which our shattered time is held and sustained. These turnings and feastings can teach us to wait and to watch, “asleep or awake,” in anticipation of that day when we will “wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom” (George MacDonald, Lilith). These holy days and turnings of the year carry memories that do not depend on our own feeble feelings and storm-tossed hearts.

Jesus teaches that the pure in heart will see God, and many commentators point out that pure in heart is best understood as a heart that seeks only one thing—as a heart that is single-minded. This would echo Jesus teaching elsewhere that, “if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” In David Bentley Hart’s translation, these two verses sound almost the same. “How blissful the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8) clearly makes the same point as “the lamp of the body is the eye” and “thus if your eye be pure your entire body will be radiant” (Matthew 6:22). We evidently need eyes and hearts that see and desire only one thing, and this one thing is never found in our past or our future.

This is not to say that God has no relationship to the past or that we cannot relate to the past in real and productive ways through our relationship with God. In fact, we can only relate to a real past or a real future by means of relating to God in our real present. Unlike our fickle memories and vain aspirations (as good and glorious as they can be with “memory palaces” and “five-year plans”), God’s memory and vision is a refuge, a treasure trove, and a guiding light. Recently, while reading Matthew Milliner’s book Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon, I was happily reminded of this line from Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth:

Sophia is the Memory of God, in the holy depths of which is all that is and outside of which is Death and Madness.

What is meant here by “the Memory of God” if God has no past, if all of created and uncreated life is equally present and actualized for God? Although God’s life is fully and timelessly actualized, it is nonetheless dynamic as it consists in the infinite and kenotic love given and received between Father, Son, and Spirit. This divine love is so super-abundant and self-emptying that it capaciously includes the offering and the receiving of creaturely life which is simply divine life in its own separate and temporal mode of multi-personal becoming. God’s fully actualized life includes the memory of all our creaturely strivings to become who God knows us to be. This “Memory of God” might also be called the “beautiful plan” of God or the “wisdom” of God. By calling it the “Memory of God,” we make it clear that it is the true and living resting place of all our incomplete strivings. With the one simple gesture of prayer, we seek to occupy each moment of our mortal lives by at once receiving it and offering it back in thanksgiving and releasing it in preparation for the next. We have no capacity to hold onto the fullness of each moment, but this fullness is not lost to us as God remains with us in the presence of each new moment. Our own memory too easily fails or deceives, but God’s Memory is the bottomless source and repository of our mortal life which is offered continually back to us with even far more than we could hope or imagine.

This is most fully available to us in our liturgical life together. Describing a passage about a prayer from the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, Robert Louis Wilken gives a beautiful account of this in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (32-36):

The Greek word anamnesis, usually translated “remembrance,” ...in this context means “recall by making present.” ...Liturgy is always in the present tense. The past becomes a present presence that opens a new future.

. . .The repeated celebration of the liturgy worked powerfully on the imagination of early Christian thinkers. It brought them into intimate relation with the mystery of the Christ, not as a historical memory, but as an indisputable and incontrovertible fact of experience. Leo the Great, bishop of Rome in the fifth century, put it this way: “Everything that the Son of God did and taught for the reconciliation of the world, we know not only as an historical account of things now past, but we also experience them in the power of the works that are present.” Before there were treatises on the Trinity, before there were learned commentaries on the Bible, before there were disputes about the teaching on grace, or essays on the moral life, there was awe and adoration before the exalted Son of God alive and present in the church’s offering of the Eucharist. This truth preceded every effort to understand and nourished every attempt to express in words and concepts what Christians believed.

We receive all of human history in God’s presence with us as we encounter and receive “the suckling lamb who has been slaughtered from the foundation of the cosmos” (Revelation 13:8, Hart’s translation). When Florensky says that “Sophia is the Memory of God, in the holy depths of which is all that is and outside of which is Death and Madness,” he is claiming with MacDonald that, in God’s presence with us, we have “that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom.” There is a beautiful wisdom and love characteristic of the life enjoyed timelessly by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is also the continual source and content and purpose of each of our creaturely lives. In God, “we live and move and are” (Acts 17:28, Hart’s translation). Or we can say that God is both the Alpha and the Omega—the source and the end—of our every moment. Or we might turn to Augustine’s declaration that God is “more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (“interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” from Confessions 3.6.11).

Someone chatting with me recently about Florensky’s claim (that “Sophia is the Memory of God, in the holy depths of which is all that is and outside of which is Death and Madness”) felt that this only further confused them about the meaning of “sophiology” as taught by figures such as Florensky and his dear friend Sergei Bulgakov. I replied that there is no one systematic sophiology between figures such as these and that “memory” here is not related to “the past” but is simply the fullness of God’s interior life common to all three persons of the Trinity. At this point, another friend, Mark Christian, shared:

Exactly, which makes it both beautiful and ungraspable. Think of the way the one crucified next to Jesus asked to be “remembered” in the Kingdom, and the way that “Memory Eternal” is therefore sung for the reposed. As I recall, Donald Sheehan had a very moving reflection on the ending of The Brothers Karamazov that explored this theme of the memory of God.

Yes, indeed, you can read that remarkable account by Donald Sheehan right here. And the very heart of that story is about one brief instant of fallen time that revealed something from the memory of God:

[My father] looked at me for a long, long minute, and then he spoke. “You’re the only one not afraid of me.” I was just old enough to know what gratitude sounded like in my father’s voice. And so to this day and hour, I know what the person my father is sounds like when he speaks. The moment was quickly swept away, for that summer of our family’s life was wholly in the violent hands of Satan. But that moment was – beyond every logic I know – a seed.

So we recite in the Divine Liturgy, “Like the thief will I confess thee: Remember me, O Lord, in thy Kingdom.” We pray that, by the divine and living power of the Son and the Spirit, we might be planted, moment by moment, like a seed within Sophia—within the beautiful Wisdom and Love and Memory of God.