Ah, as Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Speak, Memory."  As we draw and live out our lives, we indeed hope that our memory speaks to us, that we can see and hear those things which have shaped us, that which has brought us to points of significance in our lives and which have created the individuated worlds we inhabit every day.
     We also hope, I think, that what we remember becomes the basis for what some researchers are calling "post memory."  What's post memory?  According to those working in the field, post memory is the memory that we construct from the ashes of traumatic and painful memory, the recollections that we, in a real sense, resurrect, not on the basis of what was there but on the basis of our ability to create a new world in our lives.  It's like a new memory.  Every memory is of course new, but a post memory is a memory that has very little, if at all, physical connection to the old.
     Recently, however, I heard the testimony of someone who had been enslaved to a cult since childhood and who, although she has escaped it, knows that she will forever live with her scars from it.  We cannot fully elude our past.
     So do we seek newness in vain?  Not completely.  Newness is everywhere; we only need look for it.  Total newness, however, will not happen in this existence.  A pure post memory will never be.
     If there is a metaphysical, however, the possibility remains.  When the metaphysical irrupts into earthly existence, the transcendent in the immanent, everything, even memory, changes.  God's love will prevail.