With Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent coming up this week, I’ve begun to think and reflect on the areas of my life that will need some attention during this season. And venturing even more deeply into introspection, I’ve also started to reflect on reflection itself. As human beings, we are the only creatures capable of the action of reflection, which must mean that it is related to whatever else it is that makes us unique – self-awareness, intelligence, the capacity for language, however you want to describe the spark that defines humanity.
Reflection requires, among other things, our memories. Memories of things we’ve done that we’re proud of and things were ashamed of. Memories of the way we’ve thought about other people and about ourselves. Memories of events and how we moved in them and people and how we interacted with them. Memories about entire relationships and stages of life, all freshly brought to mind by a single word, a smell, an object or a picture. Memories of things we’d rather forget because they are too painful or because we don’t have the strength or courage to face them with honestly and humility. Memories of things we hope to remember forever, because they signify true joy and peace.
I’ve loved reading Frederick Buechner’s work lately, largely because of his emphasis on memory and reflection. “Listening to your life”, he calls it. Truthfully, I always love reading Buechner’s work, but it seems especially appropriate during the still mornings and evenings of winter, where life appears to sleep but is always stirring underneath the surface. Listening to your life means being able to hear what or who it is that stirs, to process your memories and understand which moments are significant, even when or especially when your discoveries surprise you.
“Because the word that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word – a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see – the chances are that we will never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.”
If autobiography is a way of praying, then similarly, deliberate forgetfulness is a way of refusing to pray. In an episode of Downton Abbey, the popular historical fiction series, one character tries to hide and forget a part of his past by throwing letters to a former lover into the fire. He proclaims, “My mother said, ‘Don’t ever put anything down in writing.’ After this, I never will.” The saddest aspect of denying pieces of our lives in this way is our unwillingness to let God’s grace reach it and heal it.
Buechner writes of a seminar he attended on prayer, conducted by an Episcopal laywoman named Agnes Sanford. “Inside us all, she said, there was a voice of doubt and disbelief which sought to drown out our prayers even as we were praying them, but we were to pray down that voice for all we were worth because it was simply the product in us of old hurts, griefs, failures, of all that the world had done to try to destroy our faith. More even than our bodies, she said, it was these hurtful memories that needed healing. For God, all time is one, and were to invite Jesus into our past as into a house that has been locked up for years – to open windows and doors for us so that light and life could enter at last, to sweep out the debris of decades, to drive back the shadows. The healing of memories was like the forgiveness of sins, she said.”
As we seek to give and receive forgiveness in this Lenten season, let’s start by inviting Jesus into our past. And let’s allow him to use our human capacity for memory and reflection to invite us back to himself.
- Ruth
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