"We can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all"  (C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory)
     As I was completing my latest book, this one on memory, I came across this passage in one of Lewis's most well known essays (an essay, by the way, well worth your time to read).  Then, and now, I'm not sure how to take it.  For one who believes in and looks forward to an afterlife with God, it conjures up perhaps thankfulness, thankfulness that she will not spend eternity apart from her creator.  Does such a fate, however, stir up fear in the heart of one who does not believe in God?  It's unlikely:  she has no categories for processing what she probably views as theological nonsense or rhetoric.
     Where do we go with this?  If God is indeed everywhere, how can anyone be erased from his purview, his knowledge and understanding?  And if God is nowhere, does this really matter at all?
     To the second question, we can reply that no, it does not.  Life comes, and it goes, and the universe moves on.  There's nothing else to say.  For those of us, and I count myself among them, who believe in God, embodied as he was in the person of Jesus Christ over two thousand years ago, however, both questions are chilling.  How can we be banished and erased simultaneously?  Is not God's memory eternal and everlasting?
     Of course it is.  But God's omnipresence is also his omniscience:  neither can work independently of the other.  As God banishes, forever, God forgets, forever.
     But in a personal universe of personal beings, though we can try to ignore the logic of our personal origins, we still face this question:  who would wish to be forgotten forever?