Eucharist: The Incarnation of the Memory of God

This afternoon I have been dabbling a bit in Alexander Schmemann's book on the Eucharist. I have specifically been looking at his chapter on Offering and Memory. It is often difficult for us to think about God remembering as if he has the capacity to forget. But memory in God does not work the way it does in humans though we do share some aspects of divine memory. The fact that God does remember is our salvation. Remembering is God's way of entering time on our behalf and overcoming time. God overcomes the destruction of life and the reign of death that memory puts us in mind of. The Incarnation is God's remembering man. It is the divine lifecreating love that God directs towards us. This is experienced anew every time Mass is offered. Why is Mass so necessary? Why is Eucharistic Adoration a devotion worthy of our time and effort to attend? Because the Eucharist is the incarnation of God's memory on our behalf where salvation is continually offered. Schmemann writes these beautiful words:

The incarnation of the memory of God: if man has forgotten God, God has not forgotten man, he has not "turned himself away" from him. He has transformed the fallen and mortal time of "this world" into the history of salvation. He has revealed its meaning as expectation of and preparation for salvation, the gradual restoration in man of memory of himself, and in this memory, knowledge and anticipation and love, so that at the coming of the fulness of time, i.e., at the accomplishment of this preparation, man could recognize God in the Saviour who had come, remember the forgotten, and in it find his lost life...Salvation consists in this: that in Christ--perfect God and perfect man--memory comes to reign and is restored as a lifecreating power, and, in remembering, man partakes not of the experience of the fall, mortality and death, but of the overcoming of this fall through "life everlasting."

This is what Mass is all about. When the Mass is happening, the distance between heaven and earth becomes no distance at all but where we begin to experience in our remembering the everlasting love of God in Christ. This is why the Mass is the incarnation of God's remembering us even when we forget God. Isn't it nice to be remembered!!

See this post for more on this topic.