Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

“Do this in remembrance.” Perhaps no time of year stirs up feelings of connection to those we love and who have loved us more than the holidays.

It’s more than nostalgia and it’s more than wistfulness. In the liturgy there is a Greek word, anamnesis, that we translate as “remembrance.” It’s one of those places in which English doesn’t have an adequate range of emotive depth. Anamnesis is better translated as “memory alive.”

It has a consuming quality that implies that we are standing in the midst of the past alive all around us. As I write this, the Christmas Eve pageant is being rehearsed and the meaning of anamnesis comes home in moments like that—moments when you realize that kids have been re-enacting, bringing alive the memory, of that Nativity story for nearly 2,000 years.

This comes home so powerfully every time the first strains of Once in Royal David’s City start up and it swells toward its triumphant end—as if the whole arc of salvation is sung. One longing voice, on the first note, is joined by countless voices here, past, and yet to come as the Church’s glad tidings of great joy swell toward the last verse.

We sing, we do this, in remembrance.

So when we hear, “Do this in remembrance of me,” what we are really hearing Jesus say is, “Do this because of the memory alive all around you right now.” Jesus is calling us to reawaken our awareness of the living and true presence of his love unfolding and enfolding us from our beginning to our end and beyond.

This is the great gift of Christmas: the chance to remember again what it means to have God with us. It is a chance not just to remember but to be steeped in the love-soaked reality that is God and God’s love for us.

There will be so many memories stirred, made, or even best left behind in these days. They are the things that shape us and make us who we are. For Christians, the memory we re-live is the birth of Christ. Perhaps the best way we can re-live, as memory alive even ourselves, that story is by how we choose to bear Christ for the world today.

May this be a time of anamnesis for you this week. May you find Christ alive all around you in this holy season.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert