The Parish Magazine

The Parish Magazine is published 10 times a year and distributed widely into the local community.

There are regular features, news items, reviews etc. and the Magazine has the Worcester Diocesan News as an insert.

I’ve been thinking about memory. What is it? How are memories stored? How are they lost? What becomes of them? I haven’t reached any conclusions, or if I have I seem to have forgotten.

I’ve always been fascinated by memories, which must partly explain why I like to listen to people when they reminisce. I’m curious about the past, and how we record it.

My ruminations have been prompted by several people in recent days.

Someone close to me is suffering from dementia, and her memory is ‘playing tricks’.

In a television interview with the Princess Royal to mark her 60th birthday, she was asked about her first memory, and she very honestly admitted that, though she felt that she remembered the Coronation, she couldn’t be sure because she had been told so much about it and had watched film of herself at the event, so that maybe she was borrowing other people’s memories

.

An elderly parishioner has died, who in his very young days drove a bus along a route often taken by Sir Edward Elgar. I enjoy the thought that I have put a communion wafer into hands that put a bus ticket into the hands of Worcester’s greatest composer. But now he’s gone that memory has passed into history, or hearsay.

The arrival of a new colleague, freshly ordained and starting out in ministry reinforces this thought that memories become further removed until they appear to drop off the edge of consciousness.

When I was a curate I remember visiting a man who had fought in the Boer War and veterans and widows of the First World War were commonplace, filling several rows of pews on Remembrance Sunday. Now there are no veterans left from that war and there must be very few left who can remember even childhood in the Great War. The memories of the very young are always suspect even when imprinted with a world shattering trauma; how many children who said they remembered meeting daddy for the first time when he came back a stranger from a war were actually reciting what had been told them so many times? When Phil Bradford reminisces with his curates in thirty five years’ time it will be veterans of World War Two who will be recalled with the same venerable respect that I accord to my Boer War parishioner.

In my first few years in St Martin’s I was meeting people who worked in the glove industry and people who remembered Woodbine Willie (Studdert Kennedy) from their childhood. I don’t meet them now. My children’s generation could be the last to remember seeing someone using a fountain pen and they can just about remember when there was no computer in the home. Those memories will be of interest to someone in about fifty years’ time, and then they will disappear, perhaps to be dug up (literally) by archaeologists in the distant future.

Some things are best forgotten. When people have no recollection of a road accident or of a heart attack, that can be a kindness.

Some difficult things are remembered, but where they have involved pain or guilt there can be healing and forgiveness, which is also a kindness and a gift. To forgive and forget is an unhelpful cliché. We can no more choose what to forget than we can choose what we don’t want to forget; but we can choose to let go of a grudge.

The forgetfulness that comes with age, (and starts at an alarmingly early age if you ask me), can be worrying and even frightening. But it is nothing to the fear of being forgotten. As Christians we place our faith in a God who cannot forget us. The God of yesterday, today, and tomorrow holds us all in his heart and in his mind in the eternally present moment. God forgives, but doesn’t want to forget a thing, and he keeps us all in his love long after we’ve become history ourselves.

**********************

Ken Boyce

.