a thought for the day (on sustaining memory)
It was my turn to preach “in” chapel today, and since this term we are doing Thought for the Day style reflections for Zoom Chapel, I thought I might share it here. I don’t know if it’s something I’ll do regularly, but I quite like this reflection, so here goes.
The gospel reading for today, by the way, is Mark 9:2-9 — the Transfiguration — so that was my starter for ten.
§1. What is the last really vivid memory you have of life before lockdown began last March? I’m not thinking about the things you know you were doing, that you had in your diary – the rhythm of getting up and going to class or to the library. I’m thinking about the things that made life life – a memory you have that is vivid and evocative, that you can see, feel, maybe even hear; perhaps of something that brought you joy, that you miss.
§2. For me, that memory is from Friday 13 March – a full week before the lockdown really began. I had a day off work, and I went into central London to see an exhibition and a play. These were the kind of things I did often – but now that they are my last experience of them, I find I remember them with a clarity and a tangibility that previous occasions have lost.
I can feel the excitement of collecting my ticket at the box office — I was going to see Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. I can see the lights going down in the theatre, feel the sense of anticipation as the hum of excited chatter faded to silence. I can hear the laughter of the audience, recognise the familiarity of the family at the centre of the play despite a difference of years, nationality and religion, and the feel the rising dread as the story played out in 1930s Vienna. I can recall the emotional dam breaking in the final moments of the play, its power and urgency the sense of being a participant in history, a responsible part of other people’s lives.
§3. This memory has come to my mind a lot during this latest lockdown; all of these feelings I miss, that I’m looking forward to being able to experience again. And I thought of it again this week as I reflected on Mark’s placing of the story of the transfiguration in his gospel. It’s a familiar story and so I was metaphorically wandering around it, looking for a new perspective. thinking about what the writer wants to tell us through this story. It takes place almost exactly half-way through the gospel, shortly before Jesus begins his journey to Jerusalem and we enter the story of the Passion – which is why we read it this week, before we enter into the season of Lent.
Mark’s gospel starts with Jesus’ baptism by John, at which those watching are able to see the spirit of God descending on him and hear a voice declare Jesus as God’s son. It ends with the resurrection – the ‘proof’ if you like, of this identity, and then there is the transfiguration half-way through: a moment in which Jesus’ identity as the Son of God as well as the Son of Man is made visible. It is a moment where Jesus is seen and known as the Christ, and it is a moment to be remembered.
§4. How memories are made and recalled is a subject of complex neuroscience: we know that memories are encoded through sensory input and that they outlast that input. Episodic memory, the category that my memory of the theatre falls into, alters molecular structures in our brain. It changes us. Memories don’t just look backwards and they aren’t just things that we can observe — they form us, shape our feelings and behaviour, affect the ways that we perceive and interpret the world. In telling the story of the transfiguration, the gospel of Mark is evoking and making memory in its audience, shaping how they see the world and how they live in it
§5. The three disciples who saw the Transfiguration were told not to tell anyone about it until after the resurrection — but they are expected to remember it. And, clearly, they do. It is remembered and shared, and the story of it is shared and remembered. How often, I wonder, did those three disciples remember this moment during the events that took place in Jerusalem in the days that followed? How did it help them make sense of things as they reflected back their experiences of Jesus’ death and resurrection? How did it help those earliest Christians hearing the gospel of Mark at a time in which persecution was beginning to rise across the Roman empire? Mark was written after Nero’s persecution of the Christians in Rome had begun, possibly after the death of Peter – and at a time when tension between Rome and the Jews was rising rapidly in Judea, tension culminating in the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the temple.
§6. Return to that vivid memory you have from last March. What are you hoping to experience again? How is it sustaining you? Perhaps even ask what is it that God might be reminding you of through that memory.
Then turn back to the story of the transfiguration. How might this story, this memory of the truth of who Jesus was and what he promised have sustained the first disciples and earliest Christians their darker times? How might it sustain us, both in the season of lent that we’re about to enter, and in this season of lockdown and uncertainty. You don’t have to try and make meaning of it yet – but perhaps try and feel this story as a memory of who Jesus truly is, even in these days.