Remember

“We call our arms and legs members of our body
and when we tragically lose them, we say dis-memberment.
To re-member, is to rejoin that which we’ve lost,
forgotten, or overlooked in our busy, distracted lives.
We remember to remember.
Who we are and whose we are.
If we don’t remember, we forget.”
–Roy Salmond

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We remember Christ in communion, reminding ourselves that we are his body. We must remember every day how that changes everything–we have to re-member ourselves into His body, the church, & into Him, our head, our Source–or else, we forget.

Conversely, we tend to try to dismember things: Memories, family members, people who have hurt us but whom we can’t forgive, parts of ourselves that we hate…even our deepest, unfulfilled longings. We try to sever them off, & wish them away, annoyed that they keep affecting us. Parts of our minds get walled up when we turn to coping instead of healing. One psychiatrist calls this disintegration. Healing can only come through integration, & re-membering.

Someone has said that the Tree of Life in the Bible is an image not only of fullness of life, but of irretrievable loss, of Cosmic Nostalgia…a longing for something we remember, yet we’ve never had. I think that is breathtakingly beautiful, and it rings true like the sweetness bell you ever heard.

Remember who God says you are! Remember yourself into the Great Story, at the core of which is the Great Eucatastrophe, the Author of which is the King of Kings! We enter Holy week, and remember what this King did to reattach our severed members back together and into Himself, the Source of healing. He was dis-membered from His father so that we could be re-membered into His family.

Remember this!