Thursday, March 28, 2013

     Life is about remembering, really, remembering past in present, remembering the present as it becomes the future.  Memory holds our lives together; there's really nothing outside of it.  Yet in an odd sort of way, memory itself is outside of time.  As Marcel Proust put it in his masterpiece of reflection, In Search of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrances of Thing Past), memory is "fragments of existence removed outside the realm of time."  If memory is outside time, however, where precisely is it?  It's here, but it's not here, either.
     Now think back to the beginning of all things, to a time when, depending on one's perspective on origins, there was either nothingness, an absolute blackness of darkness, or there was God.  And nothing else.  But where was either one?  They were there, but where?
     Like memory.  It's here, but where?  We perceive it, we experience it, we sense it, but we do not know "where" it is.  We just know that, in some way, it "is."
     Perhaps that is one reason why memory is so dear.  Memory reminds us that that on which we depend to make sense of our existence, that is, our sense of imagination, place, and time is as ephemeral, yet as real as we are.  It's beyond us, yet it's within us, too, fragments of what we once knew, and now, in an as yet not fully understandable way, know again.
     So existence.  It's here, it's there, but "where" is it here?  What's beyond its darkness?  Though it is difficult to say precisely, today, Maundy Thursday, we can say this:  it will never be darkness we cannot overcome.  Always, always, there is the love of God.

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