Forgiveness and forgetfulness...

Michael and I celebrated our forty second anniversary Monday with our good friends Cannan and James by taking a time out at the Sourwood Inn on Elk Mountain Scenic Highway. Every year when July 12 rolls around, we spend time remembering our weddings. Cannan remembers us as young seminary students at Crescent Hill Baptist Church, remembers our wedding. I was her wedding director, a superfluous assignment, trying to herd cats at the rehearsal as all the strong minded participants felt free to tell us all how it should be done. This year our laughter was seasoned with tears as we listened to James share his journey into forgetting. Communication was an essential piece of his being as a pastoral counselor and professor. Words mattered and memory informed his life. Now, he tells us, he is learning to communicate from the heart since he can no longer speak and remember freely.
Our innkeeper, Nat Burkhart, was a longtime neighbor when we lived in town. In his retirement, he and his wife, his daughter and her husband built and staff the Sourwood Inn. It sits high on Elk Mountain near the parkway and is perched among blooming sourwood trees and clouds. At breakfast, Nat engages us in theological conversation as he serves oatmeal pancakes and juice. We learn he gives all his guests “propaganda” telling them they don’t have to read it, just don’t put it in the trash because when he empties the trash cans, it will hurt his feelings to find it there. He hands us some of his “propaganda” from various books and articles that have caught his soul’s eye and I bring it home to read. One of the passages is from “The Luminous Web” by Barbara Brown Taylor,
“It is not sufficient any longer to listen at the end of a wire to the rustlings of the galaxies; it is not enough to even examine the great coil of DNA in which is coded the very alphabet of life. These are our extended perceptions. But beyond lies the great darkness of the ultimate dreamer, who dreamed the light and the galaxies. Before act was, or substance existed, imagination grew in the dark. Loren Eiseley
The physicist Neils Rohr, who was so conscious of the limits of language, liked to tell the story about a young rabbinical student who went to hear three lectures by a famous rabbi. Afterward he told his friends, ‘The first talk was brilliant, clear and simple. I understood every word. The second was even better, deep and subtle. I didn’t understand much but the rabbi understood all of it. The third was by far the finest, a great and unforgettable experience. I understood nothing and the rabbi didn’t understand much either.’
Since I have studied under Rabbi Jesus, this story makes perfect sense to me. There are things no one can talk about. If we insist on trying, as we are inclined to do, then something unforgettable may happen in the air around our words, but it will not be because we understand them in any rational sort of way.”
We all live within the limits of our minds with or without Altzheimer’s. Our imagination is sparse and bound by our experiences. Do we imagine a God who hears our prayer or is prayer a means to action for us? Do we remember our faith stories and cling to the past or are we traveling into new unexplored realities of Imaginative Being informed but not bound by our history? Have we forgotten who we are and to whom we belong? Can we forgive ourselves for not remembering?
Forgiveness and forgetfulness… part of the Great Mystery… We are finite creatures who will never be able to see through the dark glass clearly no matter how hard we try or how learned we are. Like James, I am trying to learn how to live from the heart because no words, no memory can contain the Mystery. And, I must forgive myself for my forgetfulness, my inability to keep my eye on the prize. Tina Turner’s signature song asks the question, “What’s love got to do with it?” The answer is Love has to do with everything and even when words fail to come, when my memory begins to fade, Love will sustain me as it has these many years. And it will flow from James’ heart to mine unrestrained by the limits of language. Thanks be to God for the mysteries that I cannot begin to imagine.