A straight path?

Our remembrance that God remembers us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer (Luke 3:4). Memory is the basis of both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other.

Do not be too quick to heal all of those memories, unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into your salvation history. God calls us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it.

Richard Rohr, from a Sojourners article, "The Energy of Promise"

I don't know if you'll remember my post, The Use of Emptiness, back in January, that was triggered by this same passage. There I was struck by Rohr's comment that "God calls us to suffer the whole of reality," and that only in so doing, being present, open, to the painful as well as to the delightful in what we experience, and crucially in what we remember of what we have experienced.

Here, Fr. Richard is pointing out that our memories will, if only we are true to what we remember, will provide us with the road to transformation, the "straight path" down which Christ will enter our hearts, bringing healing and restoration.

This Lent, I'm finding that being true to what I remember, honest with God and with myself about the bad as well as the good that I remember both of myself, and of those close to me over the years, is bringing healing that no amount of trying not to think too closely about certain things has ever achieved. It seems that only as we are true to ourselves, not just to ourselves as we seem to be at present, but true to the people we have been over all the years of our lives, in the periods we are so glad to have outgrown - just as much as the ones we rather like to relive - that we can let Christ, who is light and truth, into the dark and broken places of our aching hearts, where his word and his touch will at last bring freedom and peace, as they did to the "daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years," in Luke 13.