FOR a second time this Christmas, Mary “treasures” her memory of an event. The resolution of a family crisis ultimately makes the memory completely satisfied; for relief washes away the imprint of tension.
Memories construct up our sense of self; for we learn to see ourselves through the lens of past events. They also form us socially, in family and kinship groups, and our church family, and other communities to which we belong.
Memory and self are inseparable. The cruellest a part of dementia, for carers and family members, is the lack of a shared pool of memory. This is partly something that we experience as observers of a loved one’s decline. They themselves diminish; their capability to satisfy our gaze with attention and understanding dwindles. We also experience it internally, as their diminishing diminishes us: bits of us which are bonded to the one we love — and are losing — break off and are themselves lost.
There is a 3rd element in our experience of memory loss and cognitive decline: the way it affects us by way of human empathy. We may doubt ourselves, as we struggle to make sense of offering love, devotion, and respect, in addition to mundane physical care, to those that are disappearing before our eyes — sometimes in a delicate fading, sometimes amid hurtful frustration and paranoia.
Memory is a cloth, woven from the stuff of our unique experiences, and of people who we repeat frequently. Christmas belongs in each categories; for every Christmas is different, even when we attempt to recreate an ideal formula. As we get older, the material becomes more complex in composition. If it were a garment, the label would surely say “Mixed fibres: wash with care.”
Every 12 months works changes in our feelings about Christmas. Every birth and death, every adolescent blooming and elderly decline, within the 12 months now passing, witnesses to the frailty and toughness of our humanity. Like Virgil’s “tears of things” (lacrimae rerum), the truths of human mortality press insistently upon our minds.
In this Gospel, the message isn’t hiding behind parable and mystery. It lies on the surface: a paradigm for family interactions. Parents don’t understand their children. Because they’ve learned to read them so well in a method, they fail, repeatedly, to read them because the child moves on, grows up, becomes independent.
That process could be as traumatic as a bereavement for folks. Like God with Adam and Eve within the garden, they strive to maintain their little ones within the paradise of childish innocence, whilst those children scramble to go away it and go seeking latest ways of being who they’re.
But the fault runs in each directions. If this Gospel had just one lesson to supply, it will be this: even supposedly perfect parents and kids misunderstand one another. How, then, can we expect at all times to get it right ourselves, either as parent or as child?
Part of becoming one’s own person is shutting out the voice and claims of oldsters: resisting the pressure to concede and conform. It is as if — having discovered that oldsters usually are not perfect, and have no idea every thing — the kid behaves as if those parents are flawed to the purpose of utter failure, and know nothing about anything.
Parenthood is an education. It teaches us that we usually are not the centre of the universe. It makes carers of the cared-for. It puts us able where we observe the unfolding stages of life from childhood to maturity, after having undergone that process ourselves. With understanding born of that remark, and from empathy, it becomes humbling indeed to understand what patience, what restraint, what sheer force of affection our parents will need to have exercised when (for instance) we were at our adolescent worst.
This Gospel comes from a stage in Jesus’s life some 12 years after his nativity. But Christmas could be a time when the combat between image and reality is locked in a Manichaean stalemate. Then this Gospel’s lesson about family life and love is most timely. The biggest lesson that we learn from being a parent to our own child is similar as we hope for in every child’s nurturing: that — even without being perfect as our heavenly Father is ideal (Matthew 5.48) — parent and child alike will find that the love that we all know and the love that we give each teach us the reality of God.
