YEAR’S END “Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot”
Memories Memories Memories !
Memory is a complex and powerful capacity, and it is especially helpful in understanding how Jesus is with us today. We can treat some memories as “dead and gone”, as events and experiences that no longer influence us. Catherine Mansfield said, “Make it a rule of life never to look back. Regret is appalling waste of energy. You cannot build on it; it is only good for wallowing in.” Other memories, however, can be treated just the opposite; they can be “alive and present,” and help shape every moment of our life. As Mr. Bennet advises his wife in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, “Think only of the past, my dear, as gives you pleasure.”
We can get a hint of the power of memory when a sweet fragrance or a popular song, first experienced several years ago, recreates within us today the emotions associated with the original experience. The words and melody of a golden oldie can be soothing. If this power is true of aromas and sounds, how much more true it is of the memory of important people in our lives. Perhaps we remember a good friend or relative who died when we were much younger. We never truly forget such people; they continue to live within us, sometimes in very real and powerful ways. And speaking about ourselves as a nation - as a nation we remember our old leaders and our brave soldiers. A nation that forgets it past has no future and deserves none!
What about forgiving but not forgetting? Remembering past hurts is not healthy unless it is the right sort of memory. A hurting memory, if sweetened by forgiveness, is a golden memory. In living out Jesus’ Dream, we encounter Jesus in real and powerful ways. They do more than simply remember or recall a past event. They actually and consciously make Jesus present again, and everything that is associated with him comes alive.
Paying due attention to the past does not mean that we have to be stuck in it. There’s a whole future opening for you. For example, relationships are about the future. Without forgiveness of each other, the future is a hard blank wall. If there is anything we want to leave behind in 2006, let it be our hatreds. Jesus never bore a grudge; you know what he carried. And while it’s good to ask ourselves the kind of world we are leaving our children and grandchildren, let us try teaching them to be grateful: to be grateful to God for the very capacity to praise him, that we are even able to offer him our thanks. As we say in the 4th. Preface of the Mass, “You have no need of our praise, yet our very desire to thank you is itself your gift.” We want to thank God not only for the many good things that have happened to us in the year just past, but also for the pain and sadness we could endure by his strength. For example, the people we found difficult, the burdens we felt unbearable, and deaths of our loved ones, the days we found unmanageable - these were like so many celestial ‘black holes’ through which the transcendent Lord came to us. No matter if people touched our lives positively or negatively, God made his advent through them all.
Happiness is fleeting and no pain is permanent, and when they have faded away, there is our loving Creator, the faithful one who never ever deserted us, Yahweh, the “I am who am”, holding us fast in his loyal friendship. This is the indefectible Lover we celebrate tonight, the one who never ever visits us with illness and suffering, but who rather is present in our trial that he personally carries. For it is the Christ Child who personally suffers in the body of the sick child, it is the Suffering Messiah who groans under the agony of the tormented prisoner, the divine Parent who is heavy with the sadness of the wife and mother over the wayward son or daughter, or the grieving husband abandoned by his wife, or the child mistreated by parents.
The dear Lord stands knee deep in this flood of physical pain and moral shame, with the reassurance that he alone suffices, and that all will be well and all manner of thing will be well. He tells us that our passing joys and pains are symbols and reminders of our creaturehood, that our pains and joys only prove that we are meant for the higher things that await us, and that we need only believe in his power to deliver the good things he has promised, namely, community in him and with one another, when Jesus Christ will hand over all peoples and things to the Father, and God will be all in all.
Today’s Gospel is about the Word of God. The most incredible thing in history is that God’s Word, his divine Son, should become man, live a genuinely human life and die in agony. Jesus Christ is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty figure beyond description; but a person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead, the most beautiful among men, victor over death and hell. Nothing great does he put us to achieve but to love him, to be faithful to him and to give faithful testimony to him when the time comes. His desire is that we should love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love for us. Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily, like the grain of wheat or else he does not take root in our hearts. He comes into this world, dispossessed infinity, naked and cold, that each of us may give him something: the universe for his stable, for his manger our hearts and their warmth.
The author, Vesta Kelly, once said, “Many people seem to think that the right way to start the New Year is with a hang-over from the last year.” On our part, as we prepare to end one year and enter another, we look forward in hope and trust to the Lord who is stronger than all darkness.
Here is a short passage from Minnie Louisse Haskins: “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ He replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.’ ”
May the hand of Christ bless our year
And the heart of Christ hold us dear
And all blest and happy things
Which the love of Jesus brings
Be ours until another year is here.
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