Eucharist: Incarnating the Memory of God as Life for the World

Waking up this morning and reading through the news that concerns faith and life in our culture produced in me what felt like a great tension and battle. What I mean is that there is a faith crisis that not only exists outside the Church but sadly within her as well. Faith gives us the aim for what it means to live. Faith is how we acquire life; a life that is worth living as Cardinal Sheen used to say. Faith produces a life that is worth living for eternity. Faith is life because it is relationship with God in his incarnated love seen in Jesus Christ our Lord. Faith is the means by which we have the ability to really live. Faith is knowing and being known in Christ. When we talk about "our" faith it is not simply a personal faith that we express but the "I" is the collective "I" of the communion of saints in the Church. Faith must always go beyond our private subjectivity so as to enter into the collective which is why we are not autonomous believers and all the news story items today make the point that this is the battle raging in the western world today.

This post is a further development of the post below on the Mass as the incarnation of God's memory with the added qualifier of "life". Memory is a wonderful gift given by God. Though, memory can also be a painful experience for humans. Memory is present only within mankind. Man alone is able to resurrect the past as something more than "instinct" within the animal world. But there is a lot more about memory that we tap into that goes beyond the ability to resurrect the past that allows us life in the present and the future. That is the memory of God being exercised in the Eucharistic offering of the Church.

Throughout the writings of sacred scripture we find God 'remembering' his people and his promises made to them. For God, this memory involves the resurrection of the past but it always brings life into the present and promises it for the future. Our memory alone is limited to the ability to resurrect the past when we live outside God's memory. This is what Schmemann means when he reminds us that our own memories are limited to "death and time rule on the earth." God's memory always shows how imminently he is involved in our personal lives and the life of creation itself. God's memory is real; it is real because it produces life and it is his eternal overcoming of all things that produce death, namely our sin. So, in the Mass we respond to God's memory when the priest in persona Christi incarnates the memory of God on the altar and we receive God's memorial life-giving offering. In this way, it is given only to mankind to remember God as we declare his praise and glory. It is at this point in the Mass where we really come to the knowledge of what it really means to have life.

God has not forgotten us and the Mass is the memorial of life that he gives so that we can give the very gift of Christ himself back to the Father in the celebration of God's memory. God has given that we might offer back his love and life in the self-offering of Christ. Therefore, memory--rather than destroying us due to a culture of death that we now are trying so hard to live within--is turned on its head in the Mass by God's memory incarnating his life to us. God's memory is his divine power to transform his love to life and our memories are renewed to respond to his love by our love for God. When we respond to God's memory in love for God we produce new memories that are no longer limited by "death and time ruling on earth". Our minds (memories) are renewed and being renewed whereby we, in partnership with God's love, create new memories of life and love within us and in others.

In conclusion, God has not forgotten us because he cannot. He cannot forget us because to do so would be to deny himself. A loss of memory is a reminder of death and God's memory is life and overcomes time and everything that seeks to destroy life. This is why faith is the response called for today by all in the Church. It is a faith that is to move from the "we" to the "world". It is a memory that is to be perpetually passed on as the power and life of life itself. In the Mass God remembers and that memory is life for the world.