 |
Memory Awakens Hope
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
|
In one of his Christmas stories Charles Dickens tells of a
man who lost
his emotional memory; that is, he lost the
whole chain of feelings and thoughts he had
acquired in the encounter with human suffering.
This extinction of the memory of love is
presented to him as liberation from the burden of the past,
but it becomes clear immediately that the whole person has been changed; now, when he meets with suffering,
no memories of kindness
are stirred within him. Since his memory has dried up, the source of
kindness within him has also disappeared. He has become cold and
spreads coldness around him.
Goethe deals with the same ideas as Dickens in his account of the first celebration of the
feast of Saint Roch in Bingen after the long interruption caused by the
Napoleonic wars. He observes the people as they press, tightly packed, through the church
past the image of the saint, and he watches their faces; the faces of the children and the adults are shining, mirroring the
joy of the festal day. But with the young
people, Goethe reports, it was otherwise. They went past unmoved, indifferent, bored. And he gives an illuminating
explanation: they were born in evil times, had nothing good
to remember and consequently had nothing to
hope for. In other words, it is only the person who has memories
who can hope. The person who has never experienced
goodness and kindness simply does not know
what such things are.
Recently a counselor who spends much of his time talking with people on the verge of despair
was speaking in similar terms about his own work; if his client succeeds in recalling a memory
of some good experience, he may once again be able to believe in
goodness and thus relearn hope; then there is a way out of
despair. Memory and
hope are inseparable. To poison the past does not give hope; it destroys
its emotional foundations.
Sometimes Charles Dickens' story strikes me as a vision of contemporary experience. This man who let himself be
robbed of the heart's memory by the delusion
of a false liberation -- do we not find him with us today, in a generation whose past has
been poisoned by a particular program of liberation that has stifled
hope? When we read of the pessimism with
which our young people look toward the future, we ask ourselves, Why? Is it that, in the midst of material affluence, they have no
memory of human
goodness that would allow them to hope? By outlawing the
emotions, by satirizing
joy, have we not trampled on the root of hope?
These reflections bring us straight to the significance of the Christian season of Advent.
For Advent is concerned with that very connection between
memory and hope which is so necessary to
man. Advent's intention is to awaken the most profound and basic
emotional memory within us, namely, the memory
of the God Who became a Child. This is a
healing memory; it brings
hope. The purpose of the Church's year is
continually to rehearse her great history of
memories, to awaken the
heart's memory so that it can discern the
star of hope. All the feasts in the
Church's calendar are events of remembrance and hence events of
hope. These events, of such great significance for mankind
, which are preserved and opened up by faith's calendar, are intended to
become personal memories of our own life history through the celebration of
holy seasons by means of liturgy and custom. Our
personal memories are nourished by mankind's great memories
; in turn, it is only by translating them into personal terms that these great memories
are kept alive. Man's ability to believe
always depends in part on faith having become dear on the path of
life, on the humanity of God having
manifested itself through the humanity of men
. No doubt each of us could tell his own story here as to what the various memories
of Christmas, Easter or
other festivals mean in his life.
It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us
memories of goodness and thus to open doors of
hope.
|
