Rector's note

One of the hard things about the pandemic is that it throws off our sense of time. The normal rhythms of life are disrupted. In normal times we travel, return to school, visit with friends and family, and more on a somewhat regular schedule. For some, those routines are more set than for others, but those rhythms become set over time – until they are not.

They get disrupted by circumstance, change, and new realities. Sometimes those new realities are a joy – perhaps it is the birth of a child or a new marriage that is changing our reality. Sometimes it is heartache that changes them like the loss of a loved one.

When those changes happen though, echoes of the former patterns remain. When a holiday comes around we remember a dearly loved family member sitting in the chair they always did as presents were opened. We can taste a special recipe they prepared even as we are setting the table without them. Those echoes, patterns, and relationships shape our lives even when they are changed, disrupted, or undone.

One of the failures of the English language is on display in every liturgy. When we say, in the liturgy, “do this in remembrance of me” we fail to capture the fullness of the Greek word that we translate as memory. The word is anamnesis – it really more fully means “a memory that is alive around us.” So, what we are really saying is “do this as a memory that is alive.”

That is the sense that I get when those echoes of former patterns of life, relationship, love, and loss come together with our new reality – it is a memory alive. That sense of memory alive is setting in for me as we get ready for the fall. As we plan programs, liturgies, campaigns, and more for the coming year it is the old routines that are alive even as we adapt.

Of course, the Church is more than meetings and liturgies and programs. It is the calling together of a people in a place to bring alive again that awareness of Christ with us – to do the anamnesis together. We gather to know that Christ is alive no matter the changes we know – he is alive across the boundaries that divide then from now, or heaven from earth, or life from death. That living memory is the thing that will sustain the Church and always has no matter the changes and chances of life.

So as we all get ready to enter the fall and the months ahead let us do so not just with a memory of things past but with a sense that we are still, no matter our circumstances, living with Christ, in Christ, and by Christ who calls us to be alive with his Presence which he promises will be with us always. We might remember some things from former years, and miss them deeply, yet that ache of memory will be the very thing that brings alive his Presence in even more profound ways when we gather again – when we do this together again – in that space of memory that is forever alive.

Fr Robert