The psalmist believed that the dead inhabit the land of oblivion (88:13); they are in a state of spiritual amnesia. God no longer works wonders for the dead (88:11). They cannot remember God because their relationship with him has been severed. Sadness reigns in the world of the dead (Dt 34:8).  The joyless state of the dead derives from their inability to remember God. They do not share in the joy of Israel’s worship and praise of God (Ps 88:11; Is 38;18). The psalmist assumes that only where death reigns is there no praise of or joy in God; where there is life, there is praise and joy.

The church’s biblical pedagogy is grounded in the divine and human remembering that is one of the forms that God’s creative and transforming love takes. God’s remembering his people is his loving/preserving/saving them. We exist and survive because God remembers us. God’s remembering is his self-giving, always a gift (gratia operans), a divine initiative enabling our reciprocity (gratia cooperans) in self-giving remembering or communion with him.

God’s remembering is one of the forms that his freedom takes in securing both our freedom from oblivion/alienation and our  freedom for fulfilment in communion with him. No one forces God to remember, to love, or to care for us. God’s remembering is always his self-giving call to communion or reciprocity, enabling our responsibility. God reminds us to remember him; he calls us to recall him. God’s remembering/love is universal. God remembers/loves all humankind without exception.
God’s remembering/loving is the common good of the universe, the source and ground and fulfilment of all humankind. The unity of all in a ‘universe’ is rooted in God’s remembering all together, loving all together with his all-encompassing love, the common good in which all created goodness participates for its existence, development, and fulfilment. (Luke implies that God’s love forgets nothing when he has Jesus recount three stories in chapter 15 — of persons seeking what they have lost. ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Luke 23:42), the words of the Good Thief, also imply the loving/saving remembers of a God who forgets no one.)

Prayer, worship, liturgy — all are forms of  theocentric self-transcendence in remembering God. Prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving express our remembering God’s gifts. Prayer of petition are ways of remembering God’s loving concern for our happiness and welfare. All true prayer expresses our remembering that God remembers/loves us, implicitly affirm that God is good.

Our remembering God in the cognitive-affective self-transcending activity of prayer is, even now, an experience of our ultimate meaning, perfection and destiny/future. We are most fully ourselves when we are in prayerful communion with our divine Origin-Ground-Destiny. As relational beings, we most experience absurdity, meaninglessness, and frustration when we are out of touch with or oblivious to Ultimate Reality/God.
Our remembering God is implicitly our experience of God’s remembering us; for our prayer is always a response to God who is reminding us that he is our Creator-Sustainer-Fulfillment.  The Spirit of God is where it is actively reminding us to remember “Abba, Father”; for God sends the Spirit of his Son into our hearts for this purpose (Gal 4:6).

The Reminding Spirit

God has given us the Spirit of his Son to do what we could not otherwise do: “He will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you’ (John 14:26). Jesus’ gift of his Spirit reminds us to forgive others and calls us to be reconciled with them (John 20:22). God’s gift of the Spirit of his Son transforms human life, making all things new (e.g. John 1:30; Matt 3:16); he reintegrates our lives through his Spirit of reconciliation which enables us to do what would otherwise be
impossible.
God alone actually loves all persons. Apart from the gift of God’s Spirit, it is humanly impossible to love all persons, especially our enemies. Peacemakers remind us of and recall us to the Spirit of God which renews and reintegrates all human life in Christ. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we cannot know Our Father in the biblical sense of an intimate personal relationship apart from our willingness to be reconciled with all others. Our liturgical remembering both expresses and forms our identity in the triune communion where we learn to forgive others as God forgives us. The church employs its its scriptural iconography to remind us who we truly are and to call us to our real selves in communion with all others under the sovereignty of God’s all-encompassing love.

The Threat of Amnesia

Amnesia is an illness that involves an identity crisis. Individuals forget their past, their story, their relationships. Inasmuch as individuals are interpersonal and relational realities, amnesia deprives them of their identity. They forget who they are in the fulness of their interpersonal and social reality. Amnesia is, therefore, a form of personal disintegration in which persons lose or ‘forget’ themselves. Amnesia threatens communities and societies as well; for they can forget their story, the tradition, their identity.
The liturgy of both Israel and the church is a form of remembering that both unites and preserves the community of faith. To forget their story of God, their common heritage, would entail their destruction as a people. Recounting the wonderful deeds of God for his people, Moses warns his people never to forget them (Deut 6:10-13). Remembering is the law of survival: ‘Remember how Yahweh your God..’ (Deut 8:2); ‘Be sure that if you forget Yahweh  your God…you will most certainly perish’ (Deut 8:19). The Lord’s Supper entails the same liturgical imperative of remembering for the life of the church: ‘ Do this in memory of me’ (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:224-25).

The leaders and priests of both Israel and the church must be able to remind their people to preserve them; they must know their story/tradition or spiritual heritage to communicate it in scripture, liturgy, evangelization, ministries and other forms of witness. Leaders and priests function as reminders of the people, recalling their story of God’s goodness and its meaning in both scripture and tradition, proclaiming and manifesting its true goodness for all both in word and deed. Scriptural, liturgical, catechetical and evangelical reminding is the task of priests as leaders of the ecclesial community. As servants of the poor in society, they remind the people of the mission of Jesus; they recall them to share in his life of service for the reintegration/salvation of all humankind.

God reminds us to remember him through the gift of his Son and his Spirit. God’s reminding and recalling constitute the covenant community as a reminding and a recalling community of faith with a mission of communicating the good news of God’s love for all. The body of Christ and the temple of his Spirit, the sacrament of the triune communion, reminds all of the Father’s love and calls all to welcome it into their lives. The church is the sacrament of the remembering and reminding Triune God. Its members participate in the priesthood of its remembering and reminding Lord, proclaiming and manifesting the true goodness of the Triune God as the origin and ground and fulfilment of all human life.

God has identified us with himself through his Son and Spirit. He reminds us of our God-given identity and calls us to welcome it through and within the body of his Son and the temple of his Spirit, saving us from anonymity/spiritual amnesia for the discovery of our true selves in the tiune communion. The Spirit of the Father and Son has been given to us to remind us of our God-given identity (John 14:26). Father and Son remember us and call/remind us to welcome our God-given identity in their gift of their
Spirit.

Idolatry, the apotheosis of created realities in the service of a human self-apotheosis, is always a rejection of our God-given identity with the triune communion. It is a form of spiritual amnesia or oblivion with regard to our true selves. It is the futile attempt to give ourselves an identity other than our real and God-given identity as the persons that God calls and empowers us to be.. Scripture and tradition are the church’s response to the grace of God’s remembering and the demand of God’s reminding. They express the collective wisdom of the remembering community of faith in both the event and life-long process of becoming the friends of God.

The collective wisdom of scripture and tradition serves as a matrix for cultivating and educating the faith and hope and love of the divinely remembered and reminded people of God. The church employs the resources of its collective wisdom for discerning the grace and demand of God for its maturation and fulfilment..God’s gifts entail responsibilities to be discerned and met in the light of the church’s wisdom tradition.

Scripture and Tradition: Remembering God’s Promises

Scripture and tradition assure us that God is faithful to his promises. God remembers his promises or commitments. God is reliable, trustworthy, responsible.  Love, divine and human, means remembering our promises, commitments, responsibilities, vows. Human existence, development, and fulfilment evidence God’s remembering his promises and commitments. Authentically personal life, divine and human, entails the keeping of promises and commitments.

The pedagogy of the church in the service of Christian conversion teaches us that to become the friends of God, living in God’s love, we must share his trustworthiness, reliability, and fidelity. The community of faith teaches us to pray for the Spirit of the Father and the Son in whose love we can overcome our proclivity to irresponsibility, untrustworthiness, infidelity, and aimlessness. That same community teaches that the Cross represents the communion of divine and human remember/love in accepting
costly commitment and responsibility.

Christian conversion is always a call to communion, community, and friendship — divine and human — based on commitment, fidelity, the ability and will to keep our promises. Communion, community, and friendship disintegrate with our refusal to endure the limitations of others who do not fully gratify, support, or console us. The self-giving Spirit of the Father’s patient love is revealed in his crucified Son’s costly commitment to human fulfilment in kingdom of his Father’s love.

God remembers/loves and reminds/calls us in his word and image, Jesus Christ. The remembered/beloved and reminded/called community of faith has been called into existence and is sustained in its existence and development by that same word and perfect image of God. Jesus Christ is the living word and image/embodiment of the Good News, the sign of the kingdom, manifesting what human beings are like when their hearts and minds are under the rule of God, governed by God’s love and wisdom. Similarly, his body the church is the living word and image of the Good News, the sign of the kingdom, God’s new creation or new society, manifesting, however imperfectly, what the human community is like when it comes under the rule of God.
The Good News of God’s loving purpose for all humankind is manifested and proclaimed in Jesus Christ and his body the church where the Word of God becomes visible and the image of God becomes audible. God has manifested, imaged, and proclaimed himself by sending his only Son: ‘No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son…has made him known’ (Jn 1:18). So Jesus could say: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9); and Paul could say that Jesus is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15).
Similarly, the  invisible God who made himself visible in Jesus Christ, continues to manifest/image himself in Christians when they love one another: ‘No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us and his love is made perfect in us’ (1 John 4:12).

To the extent that the body of Christ is transformed into a community of love grounded in truth, God visibly and audibly substantiates the credibility of his good news for all, opening the eyes of the blind and unstopping the ears of the deaf for the liberation and transformation of all humankind into a truthful and loving community.

The eucharistic community of faith thanks God for the gift of its life in the remembering and reminding Spirit of his incarnate word and perfect image, Jesus Christ, the epitome of all communion between God and humankind.  God’s self-giving enables the eucharistic community to believe, to hope, to love and to rejoice in its spiritual journey towards the fulfilment of God’s promises in his kingdom. The New Testament writers depict the community’s response to the call of God in Jesus Christ as a life-long Spirit-guided journey, inspired with the confidence recalling the words of the psalmist: “You will show me the path of life, the fullness of joy in your presence, at your right hand
happiness forever” (6:11).