Forgetting to remember
Sometimes, usually late at night, the thought hits me...
"Jonas, you're a really awful parent."
I’ve just had a great day with my daughter. And then, as soon as the lights go out and my head hits the pillow, The Accuser starts his monologue. He drums up all of the ways I royally sucked as a dad (yes, and a husband) this last decade or so. He takes the smallest infractions and magnifies them to felonies.
Why are our brains wired for despair? Why did God even make mental torment a thing? Why did God give the role to The Accuser (aka Satan)?
I believe that life is all about remembrance. Like, maybe that’s the point of it all. To remember. Again and again.
Remembrance…
Remembrance of how deeply God - the very ground of our being - loves and embraces us. Remembrance of how low God stoops just to hold us when we fall. Remembrance of how much mercy and redemption are on offer with God.
Because, really… That’s my only hope. That God takes my awful parenting mishaps and dissolves them on the cross. And then, in due fashion, gives me a New Way of being. A redeemed, restored, and resurrected Way that integrates all of my foibles and fumblings.
Yes, remembrance. This remembrance is at the heart of the Eucharistic prayer...
"Do this for the remembrance of me."
We are alive not just to know or conceptualize remembrance abstractly... But to experience it.
And in order to experience remembrance... We must first forget.
In order to remember how much God loves us, we must first forget.
Again and again.
The flip side of the coin of remembrance is forgetfulness.
We must - and will - forget how deeply loved we are. We must forget our Source, our loving God, who names, claims, and makes us... Beloved.
And so, laying there in the wee hours
with my false self running rampant...
It's just like me to forget.
Forget that, although I can and will be an awful parent...
I am crafted and held by a perfectly loving one
who can totally make use of my parental crappiness.
In fact, my crappiness is Her raw material.
Praise be to God
and the great redeemer Jesus Christ
I am spoken back into wholeness
and made good
not of my own worthiness but of His.
In the name of the Three-in-One
and One-in-Three.
Amen.
As Ever,
Jonas
Yep. Why is it we go to despair right off the bat. Dang it! For me it must be, as you wrote, to remind me to remember the goodness and remember who brings goodness forth every day. Thank you for the daytime reminder. ;)
Yep, we are crappy parents 😜...
Yet, God in His immense grace sometimes takes our flawed efforts & forms His image of faithfulness & excellence of a heavenly father into the hearts & minds of our children, so that they see us through the tinted lenses of His image.
I KNOW I messed up awfully with my children, and my discipline was often harsh to my own eyes, yet when I ask them about their childhood memories, they remember me as a good, kind, fair, wise & loving father.