Storytime
Newsweek’s Jon Meacham was on the telly to celebrate his winning the Pulitzer for American Lion, his new book about Andrew Jackson. In his interview, he said, “History to a country is like memory to a person. Without it you can’t know where you are or where you’re going.”
Memory may be one of the most important gifts we humans have, not uniquely, but especially so for Christians. It is one of the things that makes us human and what God showed us in Jesus and what he both imagines and wills us to be, rememberers.
When the dying thief on the cross said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he may have prayed the most intimate prayer that anyone can ever pray. It was not unlike Jesus’s own prayer for us as we discern our own Way into that same Realm with him. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Maybe one of the closest things we can do to what God wills for us is to study history. Without it we for sure can’t know where we’ve been, where we are, or where we’re going. Anybody who can’t manage history or has no curiosity about it must be satisfied to be caught in the briar patch of the now with no plans for elsewhere or elsewhen. History plus imagination is what makes us story people, once-upon-a-time, it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night people.
Every celebration of the liturgy is storytime. Genealogy time when we hear about our kin and how they responded to God’s will for them from the wondering awesomeness of it to the incarnation of it to the stumbling about with it. It starts each week at the Eucharist with memory time, reunion time.