Cycles of Newness

At Bible study yesterday, a question arose about forgiveness: What if the other person won’t forgive me? What will heaven be like between us if they refuse? I found myself recalling old wounds — things I was deeply offended by in my twenties that I can barely recall today. I remember the people, but no longer with the sharp emotion of twenty years ago. Forgetting, it turns out, can be a blessing.

But what about remembering?

When we celebrate a memorial after Liturgy we sing, “Lord, remember them in Thy Kingdom.” Memory Eternal. This remembering is not the historical memory kept alive by telling stories about Grandpa around the campfire. The memories of history wash away into the sea of time, eventually lost when history itself ends. The memory we pray for is the eternal memory of God in His Kingdom — a Kingdom that never ends. We ask God to re-member them in eternity, never to be lost to time, but to live forever.

What, then, is the relationship between forgetting and remembering? God promises to forget our sins and remove them as far as the east is from the west, yet we ask Him to remember us eternally. How can the sin be forgotten yet the sinner remembered? If God forgets the events of a person’s life, what will be left of that person in eternity?

Saint Nikolai Velimirovich, in Prayers by the Lake, XV, offers this thought:

“Aimless wanderers and loveless people have events and have history. Love has no history, and history has no love.”

Events are the stuff of history — a history that is lost to the passing of time. Love has no history because eternity has no history. God, who is Love, dwells beyond the reach of time.

The event happens and is gone, but the person within the event remains — waiting to be seen as they truly are, beyond the thrill-chaser, the party girl, the ladder-climber, the wash-out. The person is made in the eternal image, layered over by a plethora of events, photographs, t-shirts, garments:

“For anything unstable is not us . . . the soul is purified in this way, as she lays aside garment after garment. Thus the ideal will appear as that supreme instant wherein the soul, having been disencumbered of all her corporeal veils, presents herself naked and pure in spirit to the vision of God in a divine vigil.”
~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, reflecting on Gregory of Nyssa

Events are the changeable parts of us — corporeal veils to be set aside. Set aside to be transfigured, not annihilated. God wastes nothing. As each veil is removed, the memory of the person becomes clearer, until we are presented naked of all our failings, sins, and regrets. The memories of our twenties are transformed into their fullness in the Kingdom, like my Bible study stories that don’t land their full weight anymore. Christ woos us as the Bridegroom, disentangling His Bride from all her veils. His love surrounds us and unites with us, leaving no room for time or space to separate us from the eternal bridal chamber. Saint Nikolai continues:

“When a bride races to meet her bridegroom, she does not see the flowers in the meadow, nor does she hear the rumbling of the storm, nor does she smell the fragrance of the cypresses or sense the mood of the wild animals — she sees only the face of her bridegroom; she hears only the music from his lips; she smells only his soul. When love goes to meet love, no events befall it. Time and space make way for love.”

The memory of God in the Kingdom is the forgetting of our sins, clearing away everything that obscures our true self and allowing us to shine forth free of all shortcomings.

Lord, remember us in Thy Kingdom.