Acts of worship (I’m specifically speaking now of worship through sacramental expression) are most fully about reclaiming memory.
When we remember, we connect, we pray, we offer, we delight, we repent, we appreciate, we hope, we help.
We all suffer from an amnesia, or loss of memory, that keeps us distant from our original Relational Center, and that ultimately destroys our right-relatedness to the rest of creation - both animate and inanimate. The term “anamnesis” is a term that speaks of an intense experience of memory that virtually places us as an actor within the story once again. We long for such an experience as this when it comes to our origin story. As Madeleine L’ Engel said, “I can’t wait until I remember how to walk on water.” Worship hearkens back to that state of affairs, and moves us in a circular destiny toward our original meaning.
When we worship, we remember who we are, our context in this vast universe, and our responsibilities born of our stewardship vocation before God. When we worship, we delight in the correct center of universal reality - an eternal Person.
To create these liminal spaces, these threshold venues of connection again to our gifted past as we connect to the One who tethers us to that past, is the role of the one who purposes to lead others into worship.
We are MemoryBearers, ThresholdCrafters, EdenReminders - when we lead worship.
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it seems to me that what you right is a very important idea. it reminded me of brueggemann’s thoughts about testimony, and the importance of keeping alive the “burning bush” as a mediated experience for those who were not there. for us, of course, it is the christ event, and one wonders what would happen if the testimony/memory-bearing would somehow be silenced by neglect.
Good word, Mark. The Christ event is what is celebrated, and re-celebrated, in the best of sacramental practice and theology.
To neglect a memory is to forget; to refresh memory is to reclaim an event’s importance, to acknowledge its implications in the present, and to re-enter its womb for new birth.
Acts of worship now take their place beside the idea that worship encompasses all of life. The life response to God is neither possible nor viable if we continually forget the purpose of ourselves, forget the dignity of others, forget the values of God and forget the hope of new creation that welcomes us forward.
Memory is often silenced by neglect - but a powerful reenactment can bring it through the soul’s rock and clay to the surface once again. Here is where worship as reenactment enters into the Story.
Thanks for this reminder, Mark.
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