A few Sundays ago I was waiting for Junior Church to begin. Out of the toy box provided for the younger children I picked up a large plastic elephant and turned it over idly in my hands. I had been feeling somewhat depressed and not a little angry for several days. Almost instantly I was transported back to being a child of about eight or nine years old. All those years ago I had saved my pocket money to buy an elephant similar to the one in my hands to complete a set of toy animals I had been collecting. In that moment, with the toy clutched in my hands, I realised that I was in touch with a small boy who was missing his father and grieving his loss (my father died early in May this year at the age on 96yrs). Having realised this, or as the therapist in me would say, “having become conscious of it”, I was immediately released from my depression and anger and the world became a much brighter and enjoyable place. The children arrived and Junior Church began and I was once more Fr Mick a sixty three year old priest.
Memory and what triggers it is a strange feature of being human, it can be a confusing, but at times liberating, faculty. This time of year we are invited by the church to do quite a lot of remembering – Remembrance Sunday, All Souls, etc. We are encouraged to think about people who to us, trapped as we are for the most part in time and space, are now in what we call the past. The point of doing this is in part to deal with our feelings about them in what is to us the present.
The experience I outlined above could be described as an “as if moment”, I was in the Church Hall at Tadworth in 2012 but for a few seconds it was as if I was in a toy shop in Thornton Heath High Street in 1957. His studies of the human psyche led Carl Jung to claim that it was not bound to space and time, hence such experiences as I have just described are very real. One way of putting it might be to say that in that moment in the church hall I became in touch with an earlier me which had been affecting the present me, and acknowledging the earlier me and allowing it to speak released me from something burdensome in the present.
Jung’s comments on the psyche came in an interview when he was asked about his attitude to death. He told the interviewer that in his view those who were psychologically healthy, including those who were elderly, seemed to regard death almost as an irrelevance, they tended to ignore it and go on living right to the end. Some psychologists would argue that this is a defence against the unacceptable idea of annihilation at death; not Jung, for Jung it was evidence that the psyche in some form or other, because it transcends time and space, remains after physical life ends.
As a theologian I find this idea rather helpful, particularly at this time of year. If I can remember and experience an earlier me as vividly as I did a few Sundays ago and if I am made in the image of God then God too has a memory, an eternal memory, He sees my beginning and my end, your being and your end. All that I am and will be He remembers. During November we will remember our departed loved ones and that memory will move us because we loved them in life and miss them because they are now no longer physically with us. God also loves and remembers and those memories are given fresh expression with Him in eternity. They live still in our memories of them, these folk who have shaped who we are, and they live in God’s memory. Because they live in God’s memory, a memory which is eternal and not confined to space and time nothing of their true essence is lost and their souls are freed, as mine was temporarily the other Sunday, from the shackles of time and space which at present normally binds our souls to a world of past, present and yet to be.
All the best – Fr Mick